title: Getting a nicely formatted timestamp without lots of overhead?
body: <p>In my app I have a textView which contains real-time messages from my app, as things happen, messages get printed to this text box. Each message is time-stamped with HH:MM:SS. </p>
  
  <p>Up to now, I had also been chasing what seemed to be a memory leak, but as it turns out, it's just my time-stamp formatting method (see below), It apparently produces thousands of objects that later get gc'd. For 1-10 messages per second, I was seeing 500k-2MB of garbage collected every second by the GC while this method was in place. After removing it, no more garbage problem (its back to a nice interval of about 30 seconds, and only a few k of junk typically)</p>
  
  <p>So I'm looking for a new, more lightweight method for producing a HH:MM:SS timestamp string :)</p>
  
  <p>Old code: </p>
  
  <pre><code>/**
   * Returns a string containing the current time stamp. 
   * @return - a string. 
   */
  public static String currentTimeStamp() {
      String ret = "";
  
      Date d = new Date();
  
      SimpleDateFormat timeStampFormatter = new SimpleDateFormat("hh:mm:ss");
  
      ret = timeStampFormatter.format(d);
  
      return ret;
  }
  </code></pre>