huge memory leaks.

Hi all .. i need some PHP/APACHE/GCC guru to help me here. i ahve been struggling for the past 2 days over why my search engine was so slow and slowing up the more used.. What happens is that instead of relying on a database i collect results from several sources in a large ARRAY of ARRAYS ( to simulate a table ..) and then perform sortings and operations in there. the problem is that i have 4000 records here.. each record has.. say 10 fields. even thought it doesnt seem like a lot.. the HTTPD demon hit by such requests grows to abotu 20 MB of size.. and.. DOESNT come back to a regular size after the page has been server! .. after 10 or so hits to the different demons (10 running concurrently on this production machine) the total allocation memory is well over 200 mb which causes disk swaps and disastrous performance degradations. I thought at first i was witnessing a bug of PHP (memory leak) but since the size doesnt really grow.. but rather stay at me maximum allocated value i believe this is a strategy of either PHP , APACHE or the compiler itself (do not release the unused memory). Comments? solutions? Giovanni Tummarello tummarel@ascu.unian.it Fight Spam! Join CAUCE (Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email) at http://www.cauce.org/ and tell your Congresspeople how Spam mailings hurt you. Help protect genuine Internet commerce: Outlaw UCE Spamming.