Marnen, Unless "scope" means something different in Ruby than it does in other languages, it would appear that the garbage collector cannot possibly free memory when something goes out of scope but, instead, when the UseCount goes to zero. Ralph Monday, November 9, 2009, 12:31:21 PM, you wrote: MLK> Ralph Shnelvar wrote: >> Marnen, >> >> I am a Ruby newbie but as far as I know, memory gets freed when the >> garbage collector gets around to doing it. MLK> Right. And as far as I know, it will do that when the object goes out MLK> of scope. >> >> Ralph >> >> >> MLK> The answer to both questions: as far as I know, it will be >> deallocated >> MLK> when it goes out of scope. MLK> Best, MLK> -- MLK> Marnen Laibow-Koser MLK> http://www.marnen.org MLK> marnen / marnen.org -- Best regards, Ralph mailto:ralphs / dos32.com