Garbage Collection

Reference Objects and Garbage Collection

The Reference Object application programming interface (API) is new in the Java Development Kit (JDK) 1.2. This API allows a program to maintain special references to objects that allow the program to interact with the garbage collector in limited ways. Not all programs require this level of interaction with the garbage collector. For example, a program that keeps a lot of objects in memory or a program that needs to perform cleanup operations on related objects before an object is reclaimed might be good candidates for using the Reference Objects API.

Tuning Garbage Collection with the 5.0 Java[tm] Virtual Machine