Different Parts of the Java Memory

Do you know the phenomenon of having to restart an application to boost the performance of that application? If so, you may have experienced the outcome of poor memory management: the memory getting full and the application slowing down. This is not always why applications slow down – other causes such as processing data from a server or a bottleneck in the network, among other things, play a role – but memory management problems are a usual suspect of degrading application performance.

You’ve probably heard of memory in the field of computer science before. That makes sense because computers have memory and they use this memory to store and access data while running programs (which in their turn are data too!).

So, when does an application use memory? Well, for example, let’s say you’d like to run an application that is going to process a huge video file. If you do this with your activity monitoring application...