Garbage Collection
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- All GC involves in making sure the heap doesnt run out of space.
- Purpose of the GC is to find and delete objects that cannot be reached.
- An object is eligible to be garbage collected when no live thread can access it.
Ways in which Objects can be GC'ed
- Nulling a reference - Explicitly assigning a reference to null will make it eligible for GC.
- Reassigning a reference - Reassigning the reference to another object will cause older object to be eligible for GC.
- Local variables in a method will be eligible for GC when the method returns.
- Isolating a reference - Even if objects have valid references, but still there is no way to reach them, they will be GC'ed.
Invoking GC
- Just a request, no guarantee that GC will happen.
- Runtime.getRuntime().gc() or System.gc() as a convenience method.
Finalize Method
- Any code that needs to be run before the object is GC'ed can be included in the finalize() method.
- The finalize() method is defined in Object. (protected void finalize() throws Throwable)
- For any object, finalize() will called ONLY ONCE by the GC. (An object can be gc'ed only once!)
- Sometimes calling finalize() can cause the object not to be GC'ed if a reference to the current object is assigned somewhere else.
- The JVM remembers that finalize() already ran and will not run it again.