So here's the deal. In my twitter project I'm drawing a bunch of tweets to the screen to float around and change sizes and stuff. I'm getting OutOfMemory errors when I draw only around 20 tweets to the screen. Each call to text() creates a bitmap image of the string data, right? Well the absolute largest any of these bitmaps would be is maybe 400X200, and probably even smaller than that.

I've encountered the dreaded OutOfMemoryError many times before and have read all the documentation and bug reports on the subject and how you shouldn't draw a ton of images, etc., etc. So my question is, I'm on a machine running Vista 64-bit, with 6GB of RAM installed, and my Processing preferences are only requesting 1610MB of that (the highest it will allow me to go). Is 1610MB really not enough to load 20ish 400X200 bitmaps? I mean what's causing Processing to lose all this memory? The displayed text has changing alpha values and colors and sizes. Is all this extra info effecting the file size of each text bitmap?

Like I said, I've read up a ton on this stuff, but never quite understood why it actually happens. Is Processing not disposing of old frames/images or something? If I dial the amount of tweets down to something like 10, it'll run for about 5-10 minutes, but then crash with the memory error. I've read some similar-sounding bug reports, but what I would like to know is how to go about optimizing my code to avoid this sort of stuff. Can someone at least explain to me how Java/Processing handles images that might cause these errors?

Oh, duh, I forgot, that's the point of creating fonts. Thanks for the reminder. Well I found something in my code which was a no no. This project is an upgrade from an earlier project. In the old version I was using size 80 font to display a few big messages. When I converted it over to the new stuff, I never actually loaded a new, smaller font. Now I'm using a size 20 and my issues have vanished for now.

I guess what I was kind of wondering was how Processing/Java handles changing images. So if I use text() to call up a string of character bitmaps, but then change the text at some point, what happens to the original string of bitmaps? Are they disposed of immediately or do they hang around in the memory until exit? Or do I have this all wrong and the memory required is only the amount that it required to load the vlw file? I'm just kind of trying to learn what happens behind the scenes that allows us to do this stuff so easily.

OK, thanks for your responses, PhiLho. I think I'm going to dig into some Java resources to learn some more about this stuff.