Garbage collection of 'my' variables

[mikeB]

The sub below does not seem to be releasing the memory allocated to the $data and @pixels variables. I'm willing to accept that the first may be an issue with the Tk::Photo module. Why wouldn't the memory from @pixels be released?

The sub is called repeatedly, passing a Tk::Image. It works as expected other than the memory issue. The memory allocation is being tracked via WinNT's Task Manager and the debugging print statements.

sub averageColor {
    my $image = shift;
    my @average = (0,0,0);
    my $x;
    my $y;
    my @rgb;
    
print "load data...";    
    my $data = $image->data(-from => (0,0,$image->width()-1, $image->h
+eight()-1));
print "split...";
    my @pixels = split(/ /,$data);
print "avg...";
    foreach (@pixels) {
        $average[0] += substr($_,1,2);
        $average[1] += substr($_,3,2);
        $average[2] += substr($_,5,2);
    }
print "div...";
    for $x (0 .. 2) {
        $average[$x] = int($average[$x] / ($image->width * $image->hei
+ght));
    }
print "done\n";
    @average;
}