You should get a profiler like optimizeIt or JProbe and find out
what your leak really is.  Its probably not what you think.

You can get a free 30 days of either.

Also, check your process size.  Sometimes you get OOM errors
when you exceed stack size or allocate buffers with size of
Integer.MAX_VALUE or something.  Run it in jdb and catch OOM Error.

sorry could not resist.

instead of using the removeAll(), just redefine the vector  using the same
name  or set it to null when you have finished.

It works, and so will the GC,  unless you did something really silly.

Another trick to use , is instead of sticking your objects into a vector,
write the objects out to  temp files , then store the file names in a hash
map (just do it in a background thread), I use this system for displaying
scanned document pages, and it really is quite fast.

be clear what a soft reference is, it can be just as dangerous as a "hard"
ref,  when used wrongly and will not  always guarantee that you will get  rid
of the  OutOfMemoryException.

seve

if that were true, then all my apps would be leaking memory as well.
I still extensively use  removeAllElements() mainly in my routines for
pulling data  from oracle,  and have not seen extensive memory leaks in that
area.

int ColumnCount = rsmd.getColumnCount();
           //  Loop  through  ResultSet  rows    
           int loop = 0;
           newmapping_list.removeAllElements();
           //  empty  the  supplier  list  
           while (rset.next()) {
               String[] record1 = new String[ColumnCount];
               for (int i = 0; i < record1.length; i++) {
                   record1[i] = (String)rset.getString(i + 1);
                   //  COPY  THE  DATA  TO  A  LOCAL  ARRAY  OF  THE  RIGHT  
 SIZE
               }
               loop++;
               newmapping_list.addElement(record1);
           }
       } catch (Exception e) {
           Error_stuff.handleError(e, Error_stuff.EXEPTION_ERROR, -1);
       }
       //never allow a bad array out
       finally {
        closeports(cstmt, rset);
           if (newmapping_list.size() == 0) {
               String[] record1 = new String[2];
               record1[0] = EMPTYBADTABLE;
               record1[1] = EMPTYBADTABLE;
               newmapping_list.addElement(record1);
           }
 
       }
       return newmapping_list;
   }