how to handle garbage collection in a recursive function

I'm writing a web crawler which basically looks like this:

//Entity class representing a page on the web

class Page

{

...

Page[] children;

.....

}

publicvoid crawl(Page parentPage)

{

....

Page[] children = getChildrenUsingSomeFunction(parentPage);

parentPage.setChidren(children);

entitymanager.persist(parentPage);//write parentPage to database

for(Page child : children)

{

crawl(child);

}

.....

}

After writing an object to the database, I want to remove that object from main memory. A page is always referenced by its parent page, except for the root pages, so the garbage collector will never "remove" a page object from memory. But when crawling a million pages, 1 gig of RAM is obviously not sufficient.

How would you solve this problem?

[1240 byte] By [loestera] at [2007-11-27 5:59:34]