Java treats string of the same content to be of the same ref. So in essence i guess they share the same memory location. Since you said your Strings are going to constantly change you will be in effect creating a new object for each new String. As lemenz70 pointed out the Garbage Collector will clean up any unused objects but you will probably get a performance hit though. You are better off just using a StringBuffer and set it's length to zero when you want to clear it out.