I have a huge problem with memory usage.

Question

I am having two very huge problems with the amount of memory the game I'm working on is using. The first is that the background image for a part of my game takes up ~45mb of memory, but believe it or not, that's not my worst problem. i'm not worried about that right now.
The really, really big problem does involve that image, though.
Whn I'm done using the image, I can't get the resources it uses to be freed. As a result, the program uses more and more memory every time you go into that area of the game, because the memory used by tha area is just sitting there.
I used Jprofiler to figure out exactly what wasn't getting released, because I do everything I know how to make everything be garbage collected, including setting all the references to the image to null after you leave that area of the game, but nothing worked.
After I leave the area with the huge memory leak and give everything time to garbage collect, the main screen for memory usage shows about 45mb of memory used by 20 or so instances of int[], which is obviously the image.
However, this obscenely huge int array doesn't show up in the heap snapshot, which according to them means there's no reference to it or the image anywhere in the program.
Here's my question: If there's no reference anywhere to this int array, then why isn't it being garbage collected?

Answer 1

Maybe you haven't actually released all references to that data.
Or if you have one 45mb image, maybe you have a bunch of other huge ones and you're just seeing those.
Why do you have a 45mb background image, though? Can't you use a standard technique like tiling it?