00018. Application runs out of memory.

When opening a particularly large Flash file or when a number of Flash files have been opened Describe SWF reports an "OutOfMemory" error.

The new release dramatically reduced the number of objects being created. In addition to reducing the memory requirements it dramatically improved performance. However the OutOfMemory error did not go away completely. The majority of files will open and display correctly however some of the largest Flash files still have problems.

Root Cause

The problem largely lies with Swing. The JTextArea objects which are used to display the text description of the selected data structure and display the specification in HTML consume large amounts of resources.

Workaround

Increase the amount of memory allocated to the java environment by specifying the following argument:

    java -Xmx128m com.flagstone.describe.App

This example allocated 128MBytes to the java environment and can be increased to the amount of memory available on your computer.

When will it be fixed?

The 3.1.2 release addressed this issue by limiting the depth of the object graph that is displayed when browsing an entire file. The main problem is with font definitions where the description of all the glyphs generates a large amount of text.

To limit the amount of text displayed, when an array of Shape or Bounds objects is encountered only the name of the class is displayed. The user must drill down using the left most panel to see the details of each font glyph or bounds.