Excessive Memory Usage in Clist and Text

[Matthew <gtk mattshouse com>]

I've written a program that queries a database and returns the results into a
Clist grid.  There can be > 30000 rows added, which is pretty hard on the
memory.  To remedy this, I've added a feature that allows the user to specify a
memory limit.  If the Clist exceeds this limit, then it removes row 0 for every
append.  When it's finished, there are only as many rows as specified by the
limit.  However, even though there are far fewer rows (2000 as opposed to
20000) the Clist still uses the same amount of memory.  It's as if the remove
doesn't free the memory used by that row.  Is this true? 

If so, what can I do?

Matthew