How to free memory in Java?

Question

Is there a way to free memory in Java, similar to C's free() function? Or is setting the object to null and relying on GC the only option?

Answer 1

* "For example, say you'd declared a List at the beginning of a method which grew in size to be very large, but was only required until half-way through the method. You could at this point set the List reference to null to allow the garbage collector to potentially reclaim this object before the method completes (and the reference falls out of scope anyway)." *

This is correct, but this solution may not be generalizable. While setting a List object reference to null -will- make memory available for garbage collection, this is only true for a List object of primitive types. If the List object instead contains reference types, setting the List object = null will not dereference -any- of the reference types contained -in- the list. In this case, setting the List object = null will orphan the contained reference types whose objects will not be available for garbage collection unless the garbage collection algorithm is smart enough to determine that the objects have been orphaned.

Answer 2

A valid reason for wanting to free memory from any programm (java or not ) is to make more memory available to other programms on operating system level. If my java application is using 250MB I may want to force it down to 1MB and make the 249MB available to other apps.

Answer 3

System.gc(); 

Runs the garbage collector.

Calling the gc method suggests that the Java Virtual Machine expend effort toward recycling unused objects in order to make the memory they currently occupy available for quick reuse. When control returns from the method call, the Java Virtual Machine has made a best effort to reclaim space from all discarded objects.

Not recommended.

Edit: I wrote the original response in 2009. It's now 2015.

Garbage collectors have gotten steadily better in the ~20 years Java's been around. At this point, if you're manually calling the garbage collector, you may want to consider other approaches:

• If you're forcing GC on a limited number of machines, it may be worth having a load balancer point away from the current machine, waiting for it to finish serving to connected clients, timeout after some period for hanging connections, and then just hard-restart the JVM. This is a terrible solution, but if you're looking at System.gc(), forced-restarts may be a possible stopgap.
• Consider using a different garbage collector. For example, the (new in the last six years) G1 collector is a low-pause model; it uses more CPU overall, but does it's best to never force a hard-stop on execution. Since server CPUs now almost all have multiple cores, this is A Really Good Tradeoff to have available.
• Look at your flags tuning memory use. Especially in newer versions of Java, if you don't have that many long-term running objects, consider bumping up the size of newgen in the heap. newgen (young) is where new objects are allocated. For a webserver, everything created for a request is put here, and if this space is too small, Java will spend extra time upgrading the objects to longer-lived memory, where they're more expensive to kill. (If newgen is slightly too small, you're going to pay for it.) For example, in G1:
  • XX:G1NewSizePercent (defaults to 5; probably doesn't matter.)
  • XX:G1MaxNewSizePercent (defaults to 60; probably raise this.)
• Consider telling the garbage collector you're not okay with a longer pause. This will cause more-frequent GC runs, to allow the system to keep the rest of it's constraints. In G1:
  • XX:MaxGCPauseMillis (defaults to 200.)

Answer 4

No one seems to have mentioned explicitly setting object references to null, which is a legitimate technique to "freeing" memory you may want to consider.

For example, say you'd declared a List<String> at the beginning of a method which grew in size to be very large, but was only required until half-way through the method. You could at this point set the List reference to null to allow the garbage collector to potentially reclaim this object before the method completes (and the reference falls out of scope anyway).

Note that I rarely use this technique in reality but it's worth considering when dealing with very large data structures.

Answer 5

I have done experimentation on this.

It's true that System.gc(); only suggests to run the Garbage Collector.

But calling System.gc(); after setting all references to null, will improve performance and memory occupation.

Answer 6

In my case, since my Java code is meant to be ported to other languages in the near future (Mainly C++), I at least want to pay lip service to freeing memory properly so it helps the porting process later on.

I personally rely on nulling variables as a placeholder for future proper deletion. For example, I take the time to nullify all elements of an array before actually deleting (making null) the array itself.

But my case is very particular, and I know I'm taking performance hits when doing this.