Garbage collection on strike?

[Mark blobby Robinson]

Hey,

I wonder if anyone can throw some enlightenment my way, cos I obviously 
need some. I am currently working on a program tackling a huge 
combinatorial problem and the results held in memory are getting pretty 
big. My solution was to dump the data to file when the list I was 
generating got to a length of a million, and then explicitly delete the 
data structure and start over, but the memory doesn't seem to get 
refreshed. In fact sometimes when the whole program has executed the 
memory still doesn't seem to have been cleaned up and I am having to at 
times do a hard reboot of the machine. I am running this on a 700Mhz 
computer with 730MB RAM running Red hat 7.0. Any suggestions as to the 
error of my ways?

Blobby