Android Reading from an Input stream efficiently

The problem in your code is that it’s creating lots of heavy String objects, copying their contents and performing operations on them. Instead, you should use StringBuilder to avoid creating new String objects on each append and to avoid copying the char arrays. The implementation for your case would be something like this:

BufferedReader r = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(inputStream));
StringBuilder total = new StringBuilder();
for (String line; (line = r.readLine()) != null; ) {
    total.append(line).append('\n');
}

You can now use total without converting it to String, but if you need the result as a String, simply add:

String result = total.toString();

I’ll try to explain it better…

• a += b (or a = a + b), where a and b are Strings, copies the contents of both a and b to a new object (note that you are also copying a, which contains the accumulated String), and you are doing those copies on each iteration.
• a.append(b), where a is a StringBuilder, directly appends b contents to a, so you don’t copy the accumulated string at each iteration.