I seem to vaguely recall some JVMs have a limit on how many strings
you can intern.  I wondered
1. what that limit was.
2. what those JVMs were.
3. how they fail.  do the cause an exception or do they simply stop
interning and just return the uninterned String.

I wrote this little test program.  I wonder if could run it on any
JVMS you have and report back if any fail.

/**
* Test how many String the JVM can safely intern.
*
* @author Roedy Green
* @version 1.0
* @since 2003-08-21
*/
public class InternTest
  {
  /**
   * How many strings you want to intern for the test.
   */
  public static final int n = 80000;

  /**
   * test harness
   *
   * @param args not used
   */
  public static void main ( String[] args )
     {
     String[] hold = new String[ n ];

     // build list of interned strings
     for ( int i=0; i<n; i++ )
        {
        try
           {
           hold[i] = Integer.toString(i).intern();
           }
        catch ( Exception e )
           {
           System.out.println( "intern exploded at " + i );
           System.exit(1);
           }
        }

     // make sure they were really interned.
     for ( int i=0; i<n; i++ )
        {
        if ( hold[i] != Integer.toString(i).intern() )
           {
           System.out.println( "intern failed at " + i);
           System.exit(1);
           }
        }
     System.out.println( "intern good for at least " + n + "
Strings.");
     }
  }

--
Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.
Coaching, problem solving, economical contract programming.
See http://mindprod.com/jgloss/jgloss.html for The Java Glossary.