What is the memory consumption of an object in Java?

Question

Is the memory space consumed by one object with 100 attributes the same as that of 100 objects, with one attribute each?

How much memory is allocated for an object?<

Answer 1

The total used / free memory of an program can be obtained in the program via

java.lang.Runtime.getRuntime();

The runtime has several method which relates to the memory. The following coding example demonstrate its usage.

package test;

 import java.util.ArrayList;
 import java.util.List;

 public class PerformanceTest {
     private static final long MEGABYTE = 1024L * 1024L;

     public static long bytesToMegabytes(long bytes) {
         return bytes / MEGABYTE;
     }

     public static void main(String[] args) {
         // I assume you will know how to create a object Person yourself...
         List < Person > list = new ArrayList < Person > ();
         for (int i = 0; i <= 100000; i++) {
             list.add(new Person("Jim", "Knopf"));
         }
         // Get the Java runtime
         Runtime runtime = Runtime.getRuntime();
         // Run the garbage collector
         runtime.gc();
         // Calculate the used memory
         long memory = runtime.totalMemory() - runtime.freeMemory();
         System.out.println("Used memory is bytes: " + memory);
         System.out.println("Used memory is megabytes: " + bytesToMegabytes(memory));
     }
 }