A Brief History Of Garbage Collection

By Brian Goetz
2004-01-22

Options - And Choices

The 1.3 JDK includes three different garbage collection strategies; the 1.4.1 JDK includes six, and over a dozen command-line options for configuring and tuning garbage collection. How do they differ? Why do we need so many?

The various garbage collection implementations use different strategies for identification and reclamation of unreachable objects, and they interact differently with the user program and scheduler. Different sorts of applications will have different requirements for garbage collection -- real-time applications will demand short and bounded-duration collection pauses, whereas enterprise applications may tolerate longer or less predictable pauses in favor of higher throughput.

Tutorial Pages:
» A brief history of garbage collection
» Options - And Choices
» How does garbage collection work?
» The basic algorithms
» Resources

First published by IBM developerWorks

Related Tutorials:
» All about JAXP, Part 1
» Make Database Queries Without the Database
» Load List Values for Improved Efficiency
» 2 Ways To Implement Session Tracking
» A Simple Way to Read an XML File in Java
» Develop Aspect-Oriented Java Applications with Eclipse and AJDT