Thread: what language should i use to

Originally Posted by mmarab

Although you can play about with the garbage collector or force it,

You can't force the GC, at best you can hint it (and doing so is usually counterproductive in that it forces the GC to (if it runs on the hint at all) perform a full GC cycle rather than an incremental GC cycle, consuming unnecessary CPU cycles, and can be forcibly ignored through JVM configuration).
Just about the only time you may want to do that is when you have an application that you know will require a lot of memory for a longrunning operation. Just before consuming that memory you might want to try and get the GC to run so you have as much free RAM as possible, hopefully reducing GC overhead during that expensive operation.

Originally Posted by mmarab

Plus java is fun.

It is, and productive as well.

Example of kind of forcing garbage collection but using runtime: But i agree, using something like System.gc() is just a hint, and it does not guarantee immediate action, but actually it could slow your app down.

Code:

/*
* This Java program shows you how to force garbage collection
* Author: Megh Thakkar
*/
public class CollectGarbage {

   int ASIZE = 1000000;

   void useMemory() {

      int[] intA = new int[ASIZE];

      for (int i=0; i<ASIZE; i++) {
        intA[i] = i*2;
      }

   }

   public static void main (String[] args) {

      CollectGarbage gct = new CollectGarbage();

      // Get a Runtime object
      Runtime r = Runtime.getRuntime();

      // Collect garbage at the start of the program
      r.gc();

      // Let's see how much memory we have at the start
      long availMem = r.freeMemory();
      System.out.println("At program start we have : " + availMem + " bytes");

      // Let's use some memory
      gct.useMemory();

      // Let's see how much memory is left
      long availMem1 = r.freeMemory();
      System.out.println("After running the program, 
we have :  " + availMem1 + " bytes");

      // Collect garbage
      r.gc();

      //Let's see what we have now
      long availMem2 = r.freeMemory();
      System.out.println("After collecting garbage 
we have :    " + availMem2 + " bytes");

      long freedMem = availMem2 - availMem1;
      System.out.println("Garbage collection 
freed :    " + freedMem + " bytes");


   }
}