Simple Class - Is it a Memory Leak?

Question

I've a very simple class which has one integer variable. I just print the value of variable 'i' to the screen and increment it, and make the thread sleep for 1 second. When I run a profiler against this method, the memory usage increases slowly even though I'm not creating any new variables. After executing this code for around 16 hours, I see that the memory usage had increased to 4 MB (initially 1 MB when I started the program). I'm a novice in Java. Could any one please help explain where am I going wrong, or why the memory usage is gradually increasing even when there are no new variables created? Thanks in advance.

I'm using netbeans 7.1 and its profiler to view the memory usage.

    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        try
        {
            int i = 1;
            while(true)
            {
                System.out.println(i);
                i++;
                Thread.sleep(1000);
            }
        }
        catch(InterruptedException ex)
        {
            System.out.print(ex.toString());
        }
    }

Initial memory usage when the program started : 1569852 Bytes.

Memory usage after executing the loop for 16 hours : 4095829 Bytes

Answer 1

Does this occur without the printlns? In other words, perhaps keeping the printlns displayed on the console is what is consuming the memory.