Question

I have a simple Android app that reads some JSON data from a php file on my local server. It’s very simple and up until about an hour ago it was working fine. However, after a little break (I didn’t even turn my PC off), it’s suddenly struggling with what seems like a memory leak, although I’m no expert on the subject.

I’m not sure why all of a sudden this is happening, as I didn’t change any code. But when I run the app my logcat slowly starts to fill with messages like this:

“GC_CONCURRENT freed, 910K, 53% free 3167K/6727K…..”

The app eventually runs, but only after about 1-2 minutes of waiting. Anyway, I was wondering if someone could check my code or advise me what maybe causing this to happen.

public static JSONArray getJSONfromURL(String url) {

    // initialize
    InputStream is = null;
    JSONArray jArray = null;
    String result = "";

    // http post
    try {
        HttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient();
        HttpPost httppost = new HttpPost(url);
        HttpResponse response = httpclient.execute(httppost);
        HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity();
        is = entity.getContent();

    } catch (Exception e) {
        Log.e("log_tag", "Error in http connection " + e.toString());
    }

    // convert response to string
    try {
        BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(
                is, "utf-8"), 8);
        StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
        String line = null;
        while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
            sb.append(line + "\n");
        }
        is.close();
        result = sb.toString();

    } catch (Exception e) {
        Log.e("log_tag", "Error converting result " + e.toString());
    }

    // try parse the string to a JSON object
    try {
        jArray = new JSONArray(result);         
    } catch (JSONException e) {
        Log.e("log_tag", "Error parsing data " + e.toString());
    }

    return jArray;
}

The JSON data isn’t very large at all.

Thanks for any advice.

Answer 1

BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(
            is, "utf-8"), 8);

You’ve allocated a buffer size of 8 bytes. That is very small. Unless you really know what you’re doing, just use the default size with the alternative single-argument constructor:

public BufferedReader(Reader in)