OutofMemoryError Problem

Question

I'm trying to read a plain text file into a String.
The file itself is 10.5MB big.
This is my code:
File hfile;
long file_length = 0;
String file_contents;
try
    hfile = new File(filepath);
    file_length = hfile.length();
    new FileInputStream(hfile).read(file_bytes);
    *file_contents = new String(file_bytes);
catch
...The line marked with an * is the one cuasing the problem.
The error message the VM is giving me is:
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.OutOfMemoryError
I'm running this code on a Sun box w/ 2GB of RAM + 6GB swap
so I don't think its due to a lack of memory or anything.
Can you help me figure this out? Why am I getting this
and how do get around it?
thanks

Answer 1

This is not a nice way to handle such big files. The file_bytes array itself is 10.5MB (in your perticular case) and when you use "new String(file_bytes);" it would create another array of the same size. If you do this very often you would easily run out of memory.
You could use the -Xms and -Xmx options of the Java to enable java to allocate more memory for your program. (by default it would only use upto 64M of system memory for a program).
check java -X for more information.