Re: Forcing garbage collection

From:
markspace <nospam@nowhere.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.java.programmer
Date:
Mon, 30 Nov 2009 15:24:16 -0800
Message-ID:
<hf1k74$6tq$1@news.eternal-september.org>
Dan wrote:

In my test cases, the following seems to run it every time... but I
was hoping that there was a more definitive way to do it:

System.gc();
Thread.sleep(1000);


I don't think there's a way to force the gc to run, but in my experience
it always does run. You can, however, do something more deterministic
by using a phantom reference. Unfortunately, the Thread.sleep() call
seems to be necessary, so I don't know how deterministic this really is.

public class PhantomTest {
    public static void main( String[] args )
            throws Exception
    {
       ReferenceQueue<?> refQueue = new ReferenceQueue<Object>();
       DiesHorribly die = new DiesHorribly();
       PhantomReference<?> ref = new PhantomReference( die, refQueue );
       System.out.println( "About to kill " + die );
       die = null;
       System.gc();
       System.out.println( "Done." );
       Thread.sleep( 1000 );
       System.gc();
       System.out.println( "waiting..." );
       refQueue.remove();
       System.out.println( "The phantom of the OS" );

    }

    private static class DiesHorribly {

       @Override
       protected void finalize()
               throws Throwable
       {
          System.out.println( this+" died." );
          super.finalize();
       }

    }
}

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