Good morning
I wrote an applet with 18 sets of animated images. One set consists
of 22 images (.gif, each image is 2K in size). The user can repeatedly load as
many sets as he desires by the click of a button. The thing now is that
apparently each time a new set is loaded it is uncompressed (from .gif)
and stored in the users memory. Very soon the users memory is full and
warnings about memory lack pop up. Or even worse the applet stops working.
I am using a media tracker. Each time the user loads a new set by the click of a button, the old set gets 'disconnected' from the variable myImages[i], but still remains in the memory. I actually only need one set of images present.
Question: What can I do?
Can I remove the "swimming" (in the memory) image files form the memory by
java code?
I very much appreciate your time, "Mug"
Some code:
/* loadImg */
public void loadImg( int iG, int iV, int iP, int
iR) {
stop();
...
//set img name
imgFileName = ...
for (int i=0; i < numOfImages; i++) {
String fullImgName = imgDirName +"/"+ imgFileName + i +".gif";
myImages[i] = getImage(getDocumentBase()
myTracker.addImage(myImage
}
//media tracker
try { myTracker.waitForAll(); this.showStatus("Loading images
done"); start();}
catch (InterruptedException e) {
System.out.println("An exception occurred: " +
e.getMessage());
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
/* update */
public void update(Graphics g) {
paint(g);
}
/* paint */
public void paint(Graphics g) {
g.drawImage(myImages[curre
}
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Thank you for answering my question. I work on a Widows NT PC (Dell 180 MHz, 32 MB RAM). When I use the appletviewer (IDE Symantec Cafe 1.51) the flushing (myImages[i].flush()) helps a little bit. That means some part of the old images must have been flushed, but still the memory load grows with every new loaded set of images, same with Netscape 4.0. I still have to try MS IE.
Regards, "mug"
I had a similar problem. I noticed that 'flush'ing and 'gc'ing helped a bit but not significant enough to prevent my machine from giving me an OutOfMemoryError.
My way of working around it was to update my code to JDK1.1 so that I could use the tracker.removeImage() method that successfully clears the image from the memory. This with some gc() calls did the job.
My code now works succesfully in various environments - UNIX, SGI, Windows95 and Mac.
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by: garikPosted on 1997-06-12 at 10:25:15ID: 1221606
Couple of things you can do: first, call garbage collector after loading a new set of images (it's sufficient for MS IE, but Netscape is reluctant to satisfy GC requests); second, free image resources before loading a new image:
...
for (int i=0; i < numOfImages; i++) {
String fullImgName = imgDirName +"/"+ imgFileName + i +".gif";
if(myImages[i] != null)
myImages[i].flush();
myImages[i] = getImage(getDocumentBase()
myTracker.addImage(myImage
}
System.gc();
...
As I said, this works fine in IE but poorly in Netscape 3.0. I haven't tried it in the final release of Communicator yet, but I'm going to in the next couple of days and will let you know.