The exact truth about Bitmaps and memory release seems impossible to to know!
Lots of learned people have conflicting views.
I'd tend to believe
post #80:
Which all sounds very authoritive and knowledgeable.
The key problem though is not the process of freeing memory but the very vague timescale it can take for memory to be freed.
Memory used by a Bitmap is not fully freed until the garbage collector has run at least twice.
Calling a Bitmap's recycle() method sooner rather than later makes it more likely that the memory release process will start sooner rather than later.
Once the recycle() method has been called that Bitmap is marked as a candidate for destruction.
You cannot force the garbage collector to run - you can only request that is run.
So with no control over when the garbage collection takes place you have no control over when the memory will be fully freed.
Martin.