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There is a special version of EventListenerList in editor holding weak references to listeners that consumes too much memory and retains unneeded WeakReference objects. Changes from editor settings are fired pretty rarely so all the settings listeners are kept for a long time. Usualy the are leaking - users usualy do not modify the settings too often. I have a core dump where >700 weak references to listeners are held in this array and most of these are already empty. Close and reopen file adds 10 listeners. Another waste of memory is storing of class names - all three usages do no need to store different listeners in this list.
IIRC only the empty references should be held in the array (together with class refs) once the listeners are GCed. Although this is IMHO not a serious leak we plan to deprecate the Settings and use MimeLookup instead which should eliminate the problem. We will also no longer use EventListenerList and use WeakListeners instead. Marking TM to future.
IMHO this is now not serious since the WeakListenerList is only used actively in CustomizableSideBar and Registry (now replaced by EditorRegistry) so this is a low priority problem.
NetBeans.org Migration: changing resolution from LATER to WONTFIX