This work presents an examination of the memory management area of the Smalltalk-80 system. Two implementations of this system were completed. The first system used virtual memory managed in an object oriented manner, the performance and related factors of this system is examined in detail. The second system implemented was based wholly in RAM and was used to examine in detail the factors that affected the performance of the system. Two areas of the RAM based system are examined in detail. The first of these is the logical manner in which the memory of the system is structured and its effects on the performance of the system. The second field is the way in which object reference counts are decremented. This second field has potentially the large effect on the system's running speed.