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

Answer 1

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 2

The garbage collector is a program which runs on the Java Virtual Machine which gets rid of objects which are not being used by a Java application anymore. It is a form of automatic memory management.

When a typical Java application is running, it is creating new objects, such as Strings and Files, but after a certain time, those objects are not used anymore. For example, take a look at the following code:

for (File f : files) {
    String s = f.getName();
}

In the above code, the String s is being created on each iteration of the for loop. This means that in every iteration, a little bit of memory is being allocated to make a String object.

Going back to the code, we can see that once a single iteration is executed, in the next iteration, the String object that was created in the previous iteration is not being used anymore -- that object is now considered "garbage".

Eventually, we'll start getting a lot of garbage, and memory will be used for objects which aren't being used anymore. If this keeps going on, eventually the Java Virtual Machine will run out of space to make new objects.

That's where the garbage collector steps in.

The garbage collector will look for objects which aren't being used anymore, and gets rid of them, freeing up the memory so other new objects can use that piece of memory.

In Java, memory management is taken care of by the garbage collector, but in other languages such as C, one needs to perform memory management on their own using functions such as malloc and free. Memory management is one of those things which are easy to make mistakes, which can lead to what are called memory leaks -- places where memory is not reclaimed when they are not in use anymore.

Automatic memory management schemes like garbage collection makes it so the programmer does not have to worry so much about memory management issues, so he or she can focus more on developing the applications they need to develop.

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

The basic principles of garbage collection are to find data objects in a program that cannot be accessed in the future, and to reclaim the resources used by those objects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_%28computer_science%29

Advantages

1) Saves from bugs, which occur when a piece of memory is freed while there are still pointers to it, and one of those pointers is dereferenced. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangling_pointer

2) Double free bugs, which occur when the program tries to free a region of memory that has already been freed, and perhaps already been allocated again.

3) Prevents from certain kinds of memory leaks, in which a program fails to free memory occupied by objects that have become unreachable, which can lead to memory exhaustion.

Disadvantages

1) Consuming additional resources, performance impacts, possible stalls in program execution, and incompatibility with manual resource management. Garbage collection consumes computing resources in deciding which memory to free, even though the programmer may have already known this information.

2) The moment when the garbage is actually collected can be unpredictable, resulting in stalls (pauses to shift/free memory) scattered throughout a session. Unpredictable stalls can be unacceptable in real-time environments, in transaction processing, or in interactive programs.

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Oracle tutorial http://www.oracle.com/webfolder/technetwork/tutorials/obe/java/gc01/index.html

Garbage collection is the process identifying which objects are in use and which are not, and deleting the unused objects.

In a programming languages like C, C++, allocating and freeing memory is a manual process.

int * array = new int[size];
processArray(array); //do some work.
delete array; //Free memory

The first step in the process is called marking. This is where the garbage collector identifies which pieces of memory are in use and which are not.

Step 2a. Normal deletion removes unreferenced objects leaving referenced objects and pointers to free space.

To improve performance, we want to delete unreferenced objects and also compact the remaining referenced objects. We want to keep referenced objects together, so it will be faster to allocate new memory.

As stated earlier, having to mark and compact all the objects in a JVM is inefficient. As more and more objects are allocated, the list of objects grows and grows leading to longer and longer garbage collection time.

Continue reading this tutorial, and you will know how GC takes this challenge.

In short, there are three regions of the heap, YoungGeneration for short life objects, OldGeneration for long period objects, and PermanentGeneration for objects that live during the application life, for example, classes, libraries.