Java Heap Space Exception

Question

Hi I'm not very experienced with Java and I have the fallowing problem - I list all files in drive C, and all folders, then I open all TXT files in turn, read into a List, do some searching, and close it. When all files are processed I do the same with all subfolders recursively, in turn. The problem is that some time into the search I have an exception that Java needs more memory. I don't know why ( because I read in only one file at a time) but it happens. Do you know any tools which could help me find the memory leak?
Thanks!

Answer 1

Now the question is what should I do to prevent this
from happening? How to make the heap bigger in Java?Making the heap much bigger just means your program will have to encounter an even bigger file before crashing. This may be acceptable if your program can specify the amount of memory it needs and the maximum file size. If it can't, you need another approach.
You said you're reading the file in and performing matching. One solution is to not read the entire file in at a time. Have a buffer that reads in x bytes, or x records, or x lines, or whatever would be acceptable, and search through that, discarding it and continuing forward when it's done. In other words, you define how much data you're looking at rather than leaving it to whatever size the file happens to be, which could be huge.