Out of memory when encoding file to base64

Question

Using Base64 from Apache commons

public byte[] encode(File file) throws FileNotFoundException, IOException {
        byte[] encoded;
        try (FileInputSt         


        

Answer 1

1. You are not reading the whole file, just the first few kb. The read method returns how many bytes were actually read. You should call read in a loop until it returns -1 to be sure that you have read everything.

2. The file is too big for both it and its base64 encoding to fit in memory. Either

   • process the file in smaller pieces or

   • increase the memory available to the JVM with the -Xmx switch, e.g.

     java -Xmx1024M YourProgram