Yes, I was thinking of C style memory management when I asked this question. So now that you have filled me in on how just cutting a object loose will free up the memory, I am good to go. What actually triggered this thought was while reading this article http://search.cpan.org/~jfearn/HTML-Tree-4.1/lib/HTML/Tree/Scanning.pod I seen a line where the author called delete on the treebuilder object and commented that this cleared memory. So I started thinking about memory management. Thanks for your time.