When does System.gc() do anything

Question

I know that garbage collection is automated in Java. But I understood that if you write System.gc() in your code the Java VM may or may not decide at runtime to do a garbage collection at that point. How does this work precisely? On what basis/parameters exactly does the VM decide to do (or not do) a GC when it sees a System.gc()? Are there maybe examples in which case it is a good idea to put this in your code?

Answer 1

The only example I can think of where it makes sense to call System.gc() is when profiling an application to search for possible memory leaks. I believe the profilers call this method just before taking a memory snapshot.

Answer 2

If you want to know if your System.gc() is called, you can with the new Java 7 update 4 get notification when the JVM performs Garbage Collection.

I am not 100% sure that the GarbageCollectorMXBean class was introduces in Java 7 update 4 though, because I couldn't find it in the release notes, but I found the information in the javaperformancetuning.com site

Answer 3

I can't think of a specific example when it is good to run explicit GC.

In general, running explicit GC can actually cause more harm than good, because an explicit gc will trigger a full collection, which takes significantly longer as it goes through every object. If this explicit gc ends up being called repeatedly it could easily lead to a slow application as a lot of time is spent running full GCs.

Alternatively if going over the heap with a heap analyzer and you suspect a library component to be calling explicit GC's you can turn it off adding: gc=-XX:+DisableExplicitGC to the JVM parameters.

Answer 4

we can never force garbage collection. System.gc is only suggesting vm for garbage collection, however, really what time the mechanism runs, nobody knows, this is as stated by JSR specifications.

Answer 5

Most JVMs will kick off a GC (depending on the -XX:DiableExplicitGC and -XX:+ExplicitGCInvokesConcurrent switch). But the specification is just less well defined in order to allow better implementations later on.

The spec needs clarification: Bug #6668279: (spec) System.gc() should indicate that we don't recommend use and don't guarantee behaviour

Internally the gc method is used by RMI and NIO, and they require synchronous execution, which: this is currently in discussion:

Bug #5025281: Allow System.gc() to trigger concurrent (not stop-the-world) full collections