A technique by which blocks of memory that were once allocated but are no longer in use are deallocated and marked as free. Also, the process of gathering scattered blocks of free memory into larger contiguous free blocks by relocating the intervening allocated blocks.
n. The process of identifying unused areas of main storage.
The system by which the Java virtual machine reclaims memory that is no longer being used by the executing Java program. A Java object is eligible for garbage collection when it is set to null, when all references to the object fall out of scope, or when a weak reference to the object exists. Garbage collection is not guaranteed to run during the life of the virtual machine. When an object is garbage-collected, its protected void finalize() method runs, giving the object a chance to clean up after itself.
the process of reclaiming space in memory that has been allocated but is no longer needed. Garbage collection occurs automatically when insufficient space remains for allocation. Garbage collection can be forced by calling collect().
The process of transitively tracing through all pointers to actively used objects in order to locate all objects that can be referenced, and then arranging to reuse any heap memory that was not found during this trace. The common language runtime garbage collector also compacts the memory that is in use to reduce the working space needed for the heap. See also: heap.
Reclaiming memory storage space by eliminating Lisp objects that are no longer used.
The process of tracing through all pointers to actively used objects, transitively, to locate all objects that might be potentially referenced, and then arranging to reuse any heap memory that was not found during this trace. The garbage collector also arranges to compact the memory that is in use to reduce the working space needed for the heap.
a tool that keeps track of all references and objects and can therefore identify lost objects and de-allocate them from the memory
The process of compacting data structures to retrieve unused memory.
The technical act of reclaiming physical storage in a memory system that corresponds to objects that in principle reside in a heap but that cannot be referenced any more.
unwanted, unused, or otherwise useless or dated information cluttering up disk space.
A Java feature that automatically releases memory and other resources when a program no longer needs them.
The automatic detection and freeing of memory that is no longer in use. The Java runtime system performs garbage collection so that programmers never explicitly free objects.
Aka space reclamation, the process whereby a filesystem manager recovers the space occupied by deleted files and directories.
claiming unreachable storage for reuse
The automatic reclamation of dynamically allocated objects that are no longer accessible. Garbage collection is not usually provided in Ada.
A process where dynamically allocated blocks of memory are reclaimed while a program executes. Garbage collection is normally performed by the garbage...
A software technique to free up previously-used, but currently unneeded, storage, typically memory within the allocated address space for a program/application/system. Because the result may be a lot of little pieces of non-contiguous memory, some garbage collection algorithms also include a compaction of the memory that is still in use. Obviously, garbage collection is only required for software that does not automatically release memory along the way, when it first stops being used, though compaction would still be of benefit.
The popular name for the automatic storage reclamation facility provided by the Java virtual machine.
(Java Developer's Guide; search in this book)
The process of reclaiming the memory of objects no longer in use. An object is no longer in use when there are no references to it from other objects in the system and no references in any local variables on the method call stack.
The process of removing from memory any objects to which there are no longer any references.
The freeing up of space for computation by making the space occupied by terms that are no longer available for use by the Prolog system.
The process by which memory allocated for objects in a program is reclaimed. Java automatically performs this process.
In computer science, garbage collection (also known as GC) is a form of automatic memory management. The garbage collector or collector attempts to reclaim garbage, or memory used by objects that will never again be accessed or mutated by the application. Garbage collection was invented by John McCarthy around 1959 to solve the problems of manual memory management in his Lisp programming language.
