Memory garbage collection is only one of the applications of reference counting; it is also used for deallocation control of system objects, Windows COM objects, and file system blocks or files.

When debugging memory and garbage collection, the second step is like investigating the flow of resources in your system. You examine how objects are created, modified, and cleaned up.

It seems our first BigArrayHolder at time 0 is still alive and is never garbage collected. However, subsequent BigArrayHolders do get garbage collected after we press the app icon. This is not ...

Automatic free memory management, or garbage collection, is inherent to platforms like Java and Microsoft’s .NET. In the latter, “managed” applications like those written in C# utilize ...

Memory leaks are a form of computer brain drain that can cause systems to be unstable and unpredictable. The fix is called garbage collection -- or rebooting.

Depending on the application code, it’s possible to exhaust memory and receive an out-of-memory error, resulting in termination of the JVM. The listing below demonstrates this scenario. Listing 1.