A classical Finalizer problem in Netbeans 6.1

Recently I tried the Netbeans UML module to sketch some simple use case diagrams.
It worked pretty well, but it didn't feel very responsive all the time. I quickly checked the memory consumption and found that it would be much higher than during my last test.

I therefore took another heap dump. Here comes the overview:
Finalizers?

So this time Netbeans needed 74,2 Mbyte, much more than last time.
Surprisingly 15,5Mbyte alone are consumed by instances of the class java.lang.ref.Finalizer.
Such a high memory usage caused by Finalizer instances is not normal.
Usually you would see Finalizer instance using a few hundred Kbyte.
Next I simply checked the retained set (the object that would be reclaimed, if I could remove the Finalizer instances from memory) of these Finalizer instances:

So int[] arrays are consuming most of the memory. I again used the "immediate dominator" query on those int[] arrays to see who is keeping them in memory:

So lets take a look at those sun.awt.image.IntegerInterleavedRaster instances and see who is referencing them:

Can we blame Tom Sawyer?

We see again that java.awt.image.BufferedImage is involved as well as Java2d.
surfaceData sun.java2d.SunGraphics2D is referenced by com.tomsawyer.editor.graphics.TSEDefaultGraphics (what a nice package name).
Lets look at the code of surfaceData sun.java2d.SunGraphics2D:
public void dispose()
{
surfaceData = NullSurfaceData.theInstance;
invalidatePipe();
}

public void finalize()
{
}

"dispose" should clean surfaceData, but at least to to me it seems that nobody has called it.
So I decompiled TSEDefaultGraphics and found dispose to be empty:

public void dispose()
{
}


So my guess is (without digging deeply into the code) that TSEDefaultGraphics needs to be fixed and call dispose on it's surfaceData instance variable.

At the End

What this shows, is that you not only need to be very careful with implementing finalize(), but yo also need to take check whether you use objects that implement finalize().
Objects that really need to implement finalize should be small and you should not reference large objects.