Copy an image into system clipboard takes too much memory

Question

Our Swing application copies a java.awt.BufferedImage into the system clipboard. Our image has a size of 1024x768 pixels and a depth of 24 bits per pixel.
The copy from the image to the system clipboard works, but is very slow and takes too much memory. Before the copy, java.exe uses about 30 MB. After the copy, it uses about 90 MB! However, a 1024x768x3 image should consume only 2,4 MB.
We did some debugging and it seems the AWT library does several copies of our original image in order to copy it in the system clipboard. I guess that each of these copies takes a lot of memory (probably because of a different format from the original image) and is not immediately garbage collected.
This is a big issue for our application because the JVM throws an OutOfMemoryError when we try to copy a new image to the system clipboard.
Here is our code. Do you have any idea? Thanks a lot for your help.
// Create the image
BufferedImage image = new BufferedImage(1024, 768, BufferedImage.TYPE_3BYTE_BGR);
Graphics2D g2 = image.createGraphics();
drawSomething(g2);
g2.dispose();
// Put the image into the system clipboard
ImageSelection handler = new ImageSelection(image);
Clipboard clipboard = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getSystemClipboard();
clipboard.setContents(handler, handler);
* An implementation of Transferable and ClipboardOwner to be used with
* images.
public class ImageSelection implements Transferable, ClipboardOwner {
    private static final DataFlavor flavors[] = {DataFlavor.imageFlavor};
    private Image image;
    public ImageSelection(Image imageToCopy) {
        this.image = imageToCopy;
    // Interface ClipboardOwner
    public void lostOwnership(Clipboard clipboard, Transferable transferable) {
        image = null;
    // Interface Transferable
    public Object getTransferData(DataFlavor flavor) throws UnsupportedFlavorException,
                                                            IOException {
        if (isDataFlavorSupported(flavor)) {
            return image;
        else {
            throw new UnsupportedFlavorException(flavor);
    public DataFlavor[] getTransferDataFlavors() {
        return flavors;
    public boolean isDataFlavorSupported(DataFlavor flavor) {
        return flavor.equals(flavors[0]);
}

Answer 1

why dont u use other data structure to store the image , which will take less memory.