Helping out the Garbage Collector

Question

Hey, need a bit of advice:
I'm working on an app which is doing a particular task every so often. Left to its own devices, the memory size of the application quickly baloons up to around 300,000k before settling in. However, if I start each iterator with a System.gc(), the memory consumption is a more manageable 80,000k. However, running gc so much really sucks down the cpu and causes everything to go slowly. Anybody have any suggestions about how I can help java clean up better?
Thanks

Answer 1

maybe GC is convienent, but someitmes I like to be a control freak.
anyway, for the benefit of the community... It appears that cleaning up a StringBuilding is easier than cleaning up a string. i.e.
StringBuilder results = new StringBuilder();
                       while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
                            if (line.equals(commEscape)) {
                                 parseResults(results.toString(), node);
                                 return;
                            results.append(line);
                            results.append("\n");
                       }cleans up much nicer (i.e. doesn't baloon up to 300M) than
String results = ""
                       while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
                            if (line.equals(commEscape)) {
                                 parseResults(results.toString(), node);
                                 return;
                                results += line + "\n";
                       }at least in my application :)
I wonder why that is?