Interesting Discovery about PeopleCode Memory Management

We are running PeopleTools 8.54.

I developed an AE PeopleCode program to retrieve a list of employees, and for each employee, to load the employee's JOB records into a record array, before doing other processing. We found that the program took 12 hours to process about 27,000 employees. We also noticed that the processing time per employee (as measured by the interval produced by the WriteToLog Statement) got steadily longer as the program ran. It started at 0.003 seconds per employee, and after the first thousand employees it was almost ten times that amount. Our DBA checked the SQL and found nothing wrong, but noticed