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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-19T23:17:20+00:00

I have an application which upon start request around 10-12KB of data from server

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I have an application which upon start request around 10-12KB of data from server (in onResume, I have a thread which starts to get data from server) and then paints it in tabular form on the view. Each row of view consist of 5 TextViews and 2 Drawables.

Now, the application works perfectly fine on 2.2 and previous version of OS, but crashes on 2.3.2 with out of memory error in onCreate method (while setting the layout from R.main).
The way to recreate the error is to keep on rotating the device (around 20-25 times), so that app keeps on switching from portrait to landscape mode.
I looked at the DDMS output and I see a pattern. If I switch between portrait and landscape mode pretty fast … system tries to run GC… showing messages such as 

02-09 12:20:08.617: DEBUG/dalvikvm(109): GC_EXPLICIT freed 426K, 47% free 6201K/11655K, external 4752K/5934K, paused 122ms

But just before crashing it prints out lot of GC messages 

02-09 12:20:12.875: DEBUG/dalvikvm(184): GC_EXTERNAL_ALLOC freed 112K, 52% free 3022K/6215K, external 5127K/5136K, paused 110ms 02-09 12:20:12.933: DEBUG/dalvikvm(28163): GC_EXTERNAL_ALLOC freed 108K, 34% free 7894K/11847K, external 20252K/20560K, paused 155ms 02-09 12:20:13.007: INFO/dalvikvm-heap(28163): Clamp target GC heap from 32.031MB to
32.000MB 02-09 12:20:13.007: DEBUG/dalvikvm(28163): GC_FOR_MALLOC freed 2K, 34% free 7891K/11847K, external 20254K/20560K, paused 47ms 02-09 12:20:13.074: DEBUG/dalvikvm(28163): GC_EXTERNAL_ALLOC freed 0K, 34% free ....

more such lines. and then crash.

I’m unable to understand why it crashes in one OS and not other. My device is a Samsung Nexus S. Any ideas? I ran the MAT tool on the Heap dump and I see 5-6 instances of main activity class all with some retained memory. Sshouldn’t the memory be garbage collected?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I see 5-6 instances of main activity class…

    You are leaking Activities. Do your worker threads keep references to Activities (or Contexts or View-derived types) by any chance?

    I strongly urge you to read Retaining an Object During a Configuration Change in the SDK. It tells you exactly what you need to change.

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