Hi there,

I think I must be doing something very stupid. I wrote a  program that over time has load a large amount of big images. I first used an asynchronous thread method but decided to go over to the new requestImage method instead.
In both cases the memory usage of the program keeps going up and eventually chokes the whole computer. Why are these threads not releasing their memory? Can someone please tell me how to load these images while avoiding this memory leak?

Thanks
Christian

Have a look at this crazy example and watch your memory usage go and up...


PImage bigImage;

void setup() {
}

void draw() {
}

void keyReleased() {
 bigImage = requestImage("something.jpg");
}

Ok I am sure you are right but then I have 2 questions:

1 How do I kill a thread and get the ram back?

2 How do I convert this example at the bottom:
http://processing.org/discourse/yabb_beta/YaBB.cgi?board=Integrate;action=display;num=1204990614

Into something that I can call multiple times when I want and decide which single file I want to load in the background?

thanks
Christian

Well,

I am on OSX and I am not seeing the memory usage go down

Can somebody help me with either of these?


1 How do I kill a thread and get the ram back?

2 How do I convert this example at the bottom:
http://processing.org/discourse/yabb_beta/YaBB.cgi?board=Integrate;actio n=display;num=1204990614

Into something that I can call multiple times when I want and decide which single file I want to load in the background?

> is the processing code based on marius' code he posted?

code is here

http://dev.processing.org/source/index.cgi/trunk/processing/core/src/processing/core/PApplet.java?rev=5386&view=markup

ok, this is without testing (or, indeed, much thought)

Code:

HashMap pictures = new HashMap();  // your cache

PImage getPicture(filename) {
  if (picures.containsKey(filename)) {
    // already loaded
    return pictures.get(filename);
  } else {
    // load and remember
    PImage image = requestImage(filename);
    pictures.add(filename, image);
    return image;
  }
}
 

delete unwanted stuff from the cache using pictures.remove(filename); (you'll have to remember the filenames, somehow...)

(note to self, capital M in HashMap, small t in HashTable...)

the requestImage() call in the middle there is already doing async loading so you don't need marius' code.

the above removes the problem you had in your first post by only loading the image once and returning multiple references to that.

pictures.remove(filename); should, i think, remove the reference to the stored PImage making it suitable for garbage collection. you can force the garbage collector to run there and then (System.gc()) or just leave it to run on its own. it's a bit of a mystery to me being an old c programmer tbh but...

Sorry getting error cannot convert Object to PImage
also the add function doesn't seem to work

-------------

HashMap pictures = new HashMap();  // your cache


PImage getPicture(String filename) {
 if (pictures.containsKey(filename)) {
   // already loaded
   return pictures.get(filename);
 } else {
   // load and remember
   PImage image = requestImage(filename);
   pictures.add(filename, image);
   return image;
 }
}

I am so sorry but I don't seem to understand. I just get errors again. Could you post a fully working sketch?

Thanks again both of you