Hi everyone,

 I am working in a quite large application and I am very preocupied with the performance.
 My problem is this:
 The program has 4 diferent graphic environments and each one has diferent functionalitys. The user can cycle through them at any time but he can only use one at a time and there is no comunication between these screens.
 Each screen has a class that has methods to draw it and to treat all the events and infomations. so, these are very large classes. I don't whant to keep 4 instnces at the same time in memory at all times when I just need one.
 So, I am thinking of using a global variable with Object data type and use it to keep an instance of the needed class, when the screen changes, I whant to free the memory of that instance and fill the screen variable with other instance of the class that is now needed.

Is there a method for freeing the memory of a variable (like the free() in C)?

And is it possible to give that variable a new value after free'ing it?

 Thank you, I found out that processing inherits the Java Garbage collector, so in Java style, I just need to reassign the Object variable and then I could call the Runtime.gc() to tell the garbage collector that it should run as soon as possible.
 Sorry for not researching enough before posting, it was a stupid question.
 I made some tests and to see if it worked but I couldn't get the Runtime.gc() to compile, it says that it is not a static function, so I can't all it like that. But I checked javadoc and Runtime.gc() actually IS a static function. Is it any Processing particularity?

Thanks again for the reply.

if you want to force garbage collection you have to use:

Runtime.getRuntime().gc();