Will calling finish() from an activity free up my memory space?

Question

I have an activity which uses considerable amount of memory in my app. So whenever the user switches over from that activity to some other activity, I am trying to call finish() to stop that activity.

My question is, will calling finish() from that activity free up memory space or just finishes that activity without cleaning the memory used by that particular activity?

Any help is much appreciated..

Rukmal Dias · Answer 1 · 2012-09-11T13:18:42.650

8

Please try this in your activity and check..

@Override
public void onDestroy() {
    super.onDestroy();
    Runtime.getRuntime().gc();      
}

edited Sep 11 '12 at 13:18

answered Sep 11 '12 at 12:54

Rukmal Dias

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score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered May 23 '11 at 05:18

The activity you're calling the finish() method from is destroyed and all its resources are queued for garbage collection, because a reference to this activity becomes inaccessible. So, all memory that was used by this activity will be freed during next GC cycle.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered May 23 '11 at 05:45

Yes pixie, is correct about finish(), just for more info on calling finish in activity, removes that activity from stack. Which means from traversing from Activity 1 --> Activity 2 and calling activity 2, if finish() is called in activity 1, then activity 1 gets removed from stack.

Will calling finish() from an activity free up my memory space?

3 Answers3

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