Pasting big text in text area

Question

Hello everybody,
I have a simple program:
import javax.swing.*;
import java.awt.*;
import java.awt.event.WindowAdapter;
import java.awt.event.WindowEvent;
public class TextPane extends JFrame {
JButton b = new JButton("Add Text");
JEditorPane tp = new JEditorPane();
public void init() {
Container cp = getContentPane();
tp.setSize(200,200);
cp.add(new JScrollPane(tp);
public static void main(String[] args) {
TextPane frame = new TextPane();
frame.init();
frame.addWindowListener(new WindowAdapter() {
public void windowClosing(WindowEvent e) {
System.exit(0);
frame.setSize(500,500);
frame.setVisible(true);
I start it with -Xmx48m and if I try to paste 5mb text in the JEditorPane I have OutOfMemory. With 64MB I succeed to paste it, but Task manager shows that the program is using 80 MB of memory (before the paste it uses 13MB)! If I want to paste 10MB I need to start the program with 128MB heap and if I paste it consumes 150MB memory (again 13MB before this)! I have the same results with JTextArea and JTextPane.
Why these text components need so much memory to handle big text areas and is there a way to avoid this?

Answer 1

What's going on here, nobody can answer this....
I tried with 3 different SUN JDK versions, I tried with IBM JDK, the results are the same. It seems that it's not a problem of the JDK, but a problem of the language itself. If you want to work in your text editor with more than 1 MB text don't use JAVA.... Or use a machine with 4-5 GB RAM at least....