Question

I am working on a small java network program for instant messages using sockets. In the application the messages are read using the DataOutputStream's readUTF() method, which return a String object. So every time a new message is arrived or sent a new String object is created in the memory, which in turn consumes memory. After a long time of communication there are several String objects in the memory.

So is there any way I can avoid this or I should try some other way of recieving messages. I am very new to Java network programming and its concepts.
Thanks.
I have a very bad coding style still I will try to make the question clear.

String recievedMessage = dataInputStream.readUTF();
String messageType = recievedMessage.substring(0, recievedMessage.indexOf("##"));
String message = recievedMessage.substring(recievedMessage.indexOf("##") + 2, recievedMessage.indexOf("$$"));

After this the message object is inserted in a JTextPane using a StyledDocument.

Answer 1

This is not specific to network programming: creating transient strings costs virtually nothing and they are efficiently garbage-collected. The only point where you’d start having issues would be if you retained the entire conversation transcripts in RAM. If you do need to save the transcripts, just forward all the messages to a file, without RAM retention.