Proper way to use Spine

Hi,
Could anyone tell me of a proper way to handle Spine in Cocos2dx? I’m creating an interactive book, and I have a lot scenes (at least I think its a lot - 30+ scenes) . We do a PageTurn between the scenes.
Anyhow : before we started using it already was memory-heavy, but when reaching critical values (for example ~60MB on iPad 1) unused parts got nicely dumped and everything was fine.
Unfortunately, when we started using Spine the memory does not get dumped and the app crashes. On most scenes we have only one CCSkeletonAnimation object (3 objects on 2 scenes, and a couple of scenes with 2 objects).
We based our code on the SpineTest from TestCpp project and we also looked at the official example from Spine for cocos2dx.

Our animations are usually quite big (512 x 348 and more), but are rather simple.

Does anyone have similar experience with memory problems and Spine?

I’d appreciate and will try any sugestion as I’m running out of ideas…