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[QUOTE="Zig, post: 3483804"]
Well, "reset" does reset the ObjectOutputStream back to the state it was  
initialized to: all objects are new, no class descriptors have been  
written, etc. Using reset() will decrease your memory overhead, but at the  
cost of increasing your data size (since the class descriptors have to be  
re-serialized).

Weak / Soft references would be slick, but there is an extra "quirk" that  
would have to be addressed. reset() will put a RESET marker in the stream  
in order for ObjectInputStream to recognize that the stream has been reset  
(at which point it will dump it's references). Even while  
ObjectOutputStream could use soft references to determine that an object  
is no longer referenced, you also have to notify ObjectInputStream whent  
it's safe to clear it's references to objects that will not be  
subsequently re-referenced later in the stream.

For simple objects you can get around all of this by using

ObjectOutputStream.writeUnshared() / ObjectInputStream.readUnshared(), but  
those will still graph references for the nested object you'll get in a  
tree structure :/

Anyway, hope that was interesting food for thought,

-Zig
[/QUOTE]

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