Hi all, As the issue VFS-748 said, it seems there's a problem in TarFileSystem about the files cache : it will be removed after a JVM gc.
I looked into the code and found out that the cache is held by the local variable strongRef : the variable strongRef and the variable fileObj are holding each other. I believe this cross-reference design here is to avoid the JVM gc on them - and it seems it's not working(I'm using JDK8). BTW the same cross-reference design also exists in ZipFileSystem, and it's also not working - we could remove the variable strongRef in ZipFileSystem and the gc is not working on it. Not sure why it's like this. So why do we make the variable strongRef a local variable here in TarFileSystem? We could simply make it a private field of the class TarFileSystem and the garbage collector would no longer work here - this issue could simply be fixed(and my fix is in branch VFS-748 of my forked repo https://www.github.com/PeterAlfredLee/commons-vfs). From my view this is a simple fix. Are there some other reasons limiting the variable strongRef to be a local variable instead of a private field here? It's appreciated if someone could tell me - seems this code was written back in 2005 by the git log. cheers, Lee
