Thread objects not garbage collected after being finished

Question

I noticed that my application is leaking memory. This can be seen in DDMS, and I managed to get a OutOfMemoryError.

I found the source of the leak. One of the activitie

Answer 1

The anonymous runnable class used by the thread would have a reference to the activity ('this'). As the thread is referenced by the activity, and the runnable in the thread references the activity, the GC will never collect either of them.

Try doing something more like this:

private static RunnableClass implements Runnable
{
    @Override
    public void run() {
        while (!finished) {
            try {
                Thread.sleep(100);
            } catch (InterruptedException e) {
                // TODO Auto-generated catch block
                e.printStackTrace();
            }
        }
        Log.d(getClass().getName(), "Thread finished");
    }
});

Thread thread = new Thread(new RunnableClass());