This is the first part of a series of blog posts I intend to write,
whose aim will be to explain how garbage collection works in the real
world (in particular, with the JVM).
I will cover some theory that I believe is necessary to understand
garbage collection enough for practical purposes, but will keep it to a
minimum.
The motivation is that garbage collection related questions keeps coming up in variety of circumstances, including (for example) on the Cassandra mailing list. The problem when trying to help is that explaining the nuances of garbage collection is too much of an effort to do ad-hoc in a mailing list reply tailored to that specific situation, and you rarely have enough information about the situation to tell someone what their particular problem is caused by.
I hope that this guide will be something I can point to in answering these questions. I hope that it will be detailed enough to be useful, yet easy to digest and non-academic enough for a broad audience. I very much appreciate any feedback on what I need to clarify, improve, rip out completely, etc.Much of the information here is not specific to Java. However, in order to avoid constantly invoking generic and abstract terminology, I am going to speak in concrete terms of the Hotspot JVM wherever possible.
The motivation is that garbage collection related questions keeps coming up in variety of circumstances, including (for example) on the Cassandra mailing list. The problem when trying to help is that explaining the nuances of garbage collection is too much of an effort to do ad-hoc in a mailing list reply tailored to that specific situation, and you rarely have enough information about the situation to tell someone what their particular problem is caused by.
I hope that this guide will be something I can point to in answering these questions. I hope that it will be detailed enough to be useful, yet easy to digest and non-academic enough for a broad audience. I very much appreciate any feedback on what I need to clarify, improve, rip out completely, etc.Much of the information here is not specific to Java. However, in order to avoid constantly invoking generic and abstract terminology, I am going to speak in concrete terms of the Hotspot JVM wherever possible.
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