title: Does a hash shrink in Perl as you delete elements?
body: <p>Does a hash shrink in Perl as you delete elements. </p>
  
  <p>More specifically I had a perl program that I inherited that would parse a huge file ( 1 GB ) and load up a hash of hashes. it would do that same for another file and then do a comparison of different elements. The memory consumption was huge during this process and even though I added deleting hash elements has they were used the memory consumption seemed to be unaffected.</p>
  
  <p>The script was extremely slow and such a memory hog. I know it was not well designed but any ideas about the hash memory usage?</p>