OutOfMemoryException ...

Question

The method below is called several thousand times when 50 users are working with the same screen/form. Result: 2 hours later, the application throws an OutOfMemoryException. The profiler indicates that this method creates many XMLAttr instances when calling the setAttribute method. These objects are not garbage collected by the JVM.
What is wrong with this method? Or is this a bug in the XML parser (Oracle)?
The mDataRowModelDataRowElement object is created when the user starts working with the form and it can be garbage collected when the user exits the given form, which never happens because the application throws an OutOfMemoryException before the user could finish his/her job (after 2 hours).
public Element getRowElement( int pRow, boolean pFull )
throws DTMException
//Performance: this method is called several thousand times.
Element dataRowElement = (Element)m_dataRowsElement.getChildNodes().item( pRow );
if ( dataRowElement != null && pFull )
NodeList dataCellsElements = dataRowElement.getChildNodes();
NodeList modelDataCellsElements = mDataRowModelDataRowElement.getChildNodes();
//int dataCellsElementsLength = dataCellsElements.getLength();
Element dataCellElement;
Element modelDataCellElement ;
for ( int i = 0; i < dataCellsElementsLength; i++ )
// ???? look into making this a separate method as something
// similar is also called from the dataCells.
dataCellElement = (Element)dataCellsElements.item(i);
modelDataCellElement = (Element)modelDataCellsElements.item(i);
dataCellElement.setAttribute( "entName", modelDataCellElement.getAttribute( "entName") );
dataCellElement.setAttribute( "SQLName", modelDataCellElement.getAttribute( "SQLName") );
// we cannot change this otherwise it thinks it has changed.
// dataCellElement.setAttribute( "oldVal", modelDataCellElement.getAttribute( "oldVal") );
dataCellElement.setAttribute( "cls", modelDataCellElement.getAttribute( "cls") );
dataCellElement.setAttribute( "keyOrd", modelDataCellElement.getAttribute( "keyOrd") );
dataCellElement.setAttribute( "ord", modelDataCellElement.getAttribute( "ord") );
dataCellElement.setAttribute( "upd", modelDataCellElement.getAttribute( "upd") );
return dataRowElement;
}

Answer 1

Yes, this method is called many times, but the application is being tested with LoadRunner and after creating attributes for a row (query), the next step of the test scenerio is a roll back operation and this will remove the rows from the DOM object and the row holds the attributes created in the method you see above.
This is how the rows are removed from the DOM (m_dataRowsElement).
1. create a nodelist (m_dataRowsElement.getChildNodes();)
2. create a loop
3. call the removeChild method in the loop
m_dataRowsElement.removeChild( node );