CODEWITHSUNDEEP
garbage-collectionjvm
Sachin Rane
Sachin Rane

Reputation: 176

Why open connections or unclosed resources can not be garbage collected?

I just gone though memory leaks articles but not getting Why open connections or unclosed resources can not be garbage collected in jvm? Can someone please help with example. Thanks in advance.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 285

Answers (1)

boneill
boneill

Reputation: 1516

The Java garbage collector isn't required to ever reclaim an object, even when it's unreachable. In practice, it's usually reclaimed eventually, but this can take hours (or days, or ∞), depending on the application and garbage collection activity. Read up on generational garbage collection to learn more about this.

The first JVM only supported a conservative garbage collector. There's a bunch of stuff online regarding this design as well, but the main caveat when using one of these type of collectors is that it might never identify an object as being unreachable even when it truly is.

Finally, there's the "epsilon" collector option, which never runs garbage collection at all. This is just used for performance testing and for short-lived Java processes. Once a process exits, the open resources get closed by the operating system anyhow.

Upvotes: 2

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