1. Be very careful. Simply because something is out of scope does not mean that it's been garbage-collected. Directly from the Camel (3rd ed., p.223):

   Lexical variables don't get automatically garbage collected just because their scope has exited; they wait to get recycled until they're no longer used, which is muych more important. To create private variables ...

   I would suspect that this is a minor problem, but probably not the whole issue.

2. As for the constantly loaded classes ... I'm going to guess that you're creating the classes using some sort of AUTOLOAD(), eval, or combination of the two. If that's the case, these classes are probably taking quite a chunk of memory. Now, by doing it this way, you're taking away any possible compile-time optimizations that the compiler could do. In addition, I think that once you use AUTOLOAD() once, the compiler will allocate additional memory every time, just as if you used $` or $' in regexps.

   I think that this is the culprit. I would suspect that it's not that you're loading 10^12 classes, but that each class is taking a bigger chunk than you realize.

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/me wants to be the brightest bulb in the chandelier!

Vote paco for President!