Re: Memory Usage and Garbage Collection

[Nikola Milutinovic]

So the instance, and it's string, can still be GC'd, right?

Nope.

There is still a live reference to each OtherObject instance sitting in
the static HashMap "cache".  Therefore, this instance cannot be GC'd, even
though *you* have released your own reference to it.  And, if the
OtherObject class is loaded from Tomcat's common/lib directory (for
example), there is no way to ***ever*** GC this instance, because the
public API of the OtherObject class doesn't offer any way to clear the
cache.

Wouldn't it be the responsibility of the Factory to worry about releasing objects to the GC?

I mean, if it implements caching, it should have some sort of policy when an instantiated (and, thus, cached) object is a candidate for GC. Obvious guidelines are:

- if it is not used
- if it has last been used less recently than some limit

One can also think of a non-linear function, which checks the available memory or has it's internal memory limit.

Nix.


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