post - Posting a large file in Android

Question

I sometimes get an OutOfMemoryError when posting a large file in Android. This is the code I'm using. Am I doing something wrong?

HttpURLConnection con = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
con.setRequestMethod("POST");
con.setDoInput(true);
con.setDoOutput(true);
ostream = new DataOutputStream(con.getOutputStream());
byte[] buffer = new byte[1536];
int count;
while ((count = fileInput.read(buffer)) != -1) {
    ostream.write(buffer, 0, count); // This sometimes causes OutOfMemoryError
}
ostream.flush();

Would calling ostream.flush() inside the while loop do any good?

Answer 1

If you do it like that, the whole POST must be buffered in memory. This is because it needs to send the Content-Length header first.

Instead, I think you want to use the Apache HTTP libraries, including FileEntity. That will let it figure out the length before reading the file. You can use this answer as a starting point. But the second parameter to the FileEntity constructor should be a mime type (like image/png, text/html, etc.).