What is the garbage collector in Java?

Question

I am new to Java and confused about the garbage collector in Java. What does it actually do and when does it comes into action. Please describe some of the properties of the garbage collector in Java.

Answer 1

To put it in the most simple terms that even a non-programmer can understand, when a program processes data it creates intermediate data and storage space (variables, arrays, certain object metadata etc.) for that data.

When these objects are accessed across functions or over a certain size, they are allocated from a central heap. Then when they are no long needed, they need to be cleaned up.

There are some very good articles online about how this works, so I'll just cover the very basic definition.

The GC is basically the function that does this cleanup. To do this is clears table entries that aren't referenced by any active objects, effectively deleting the objects, than copies and compacts the memory. It's a little more complicated than this, but you get the idea.

The big problem is some parts this process often requires the entire Java VM to require to be stopped temporarily to take place, as well as this entire process being very processor and memory bandwidth intensive. The various options as of GCs and tuning options for each one are designed to balance these various issues with the whole GC process.

Answer 2

Garbage collector is a component of jvm.

It is used to collect garbage when ever cpu gets free.

Here garbage means unused objects it runs in Background of main program

to monitor the status of the main program.

Answer 3

As objects are dynamically allocated by the new operator, you can ask how these objects are destroyed and how busy memory is freed. In other languages such as C++, you need to free manually allocated objects dynamically by the delete operator. Java has a different approach; it automatically handles deallocation. The technique is known as Garbage Collection.

It works like this: when there are no references to an object, it is assumed that this object is no longer needed and you can retrieve the memory occupied by the object. It is not necessary to explicitly destroy objects as in C++. Garbage collection occurs sporadically during program execution; It does not simply happen because there are one or more objects that are no longer used. In addition, several Java runtime implementations have different approaches to garbage collection, but most programmers do not have to worry about this when writing programs.

Answer 4

An object becomes eligible for Garbage collection or GC if it's not reachable from any live threads or by any static references.

In other words, you can say that an object becomes eligible for garbage collection if its all references are null. Cyclic dependencies are not counted as the reference so if object A has a reference to object B and object B has a reference to Object A and they don't have any other live reference then both Objects A and B will be eligible for Garbage collection.

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Heap Generations for Garbage Collection -

Java objects are created in Heap and Heap is divided into three parts or generations for the sake of garbage collection in Java, these are called as Young(New) generation, Tenured(Old) Generation and Perm Area of the heap.

New Generation is further divided into three parts known as Eden space, Survivor 1 and Survivor 2 space. When an object first created in heap its gets created in new generation inside Eden space and after subsequent minor garbage collection if an object survives its gets moved to survivor 1 and then survivor 2 before major garbage collection moved that object to old or tenured generation.

Perm space of Java Heap is where JVM stores Metadata about classes and methods, String pool and Class level details.

Refer here for more : Garbage Collection

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You can't force JVM to run Garbage Collection though you can make a request using System.gc() or Runtime.gc() method.

In java.lang.System

public static void gc() {
    Runtime.getRuntime().gc();  
}

In java.lang.Runtime

public native void gc();  // note native  method

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Mark and Sweep Algorithm -

This is one of the most popular algorithms used by Garbage collection. Any garbage collection algorithm must perform 2 basic operations. One, it should be able to detect all the unreachable objects and secondly, it must reclaim the heap space used by the garbage objects and make the space available again to the program.

The above operations are performed by Mark and Sweep Algorithm in two phases:

1. Mark phase
2. Sweep phase

read here for more details - Mark and Sweep Algorithm

Answer 5

Garbage collection refers to the process of automatically freeing memory on the heap by deleting objects that are no longer reachable in your program. The heap is a memory which is referred to as the free store, represents a large pool of unused memory allocated to your Java application.

Answer 6

Automatic garbage collection is the process of looking at heap memory, identifying which objects are in use and which are not, and deleting the unused objects. An in use object, or a referenced object, means that some part of your program still maintains a pointer to that object. An unused object, or unreferenced object, is no longer referenced by any part of your program. So the memory used by an unreferenced object can be reclaimed.

In a programming language like C, allocating and deallocating memory is a manual process. In Java, process of deallocating memory is handled automatically by the garbage collector. Please check the link for a better understanding. http://www.oracle.com/webfolder/technetwork/tutorials/obe/java/gc01/index.html