Java – Why is it bad practice to call System.gc()

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After answering a question about how to force-free objects in Java (the guy was clearing a 1.5GB HashMap) with System.gc(), I was told it's bad practice to call System.gc() manually, but the comments were not entirely convincing. In addition, no one seemed to dare to upvote, nor downvote my answer.

I was told there that it's bad practice, but then I was also told that garbage collector runs don't systematically stop the world anymore, and that it could also effectively be used by the JVM only as a hint, so I'm kind of at loss.

I do understand that the JVM usually knows better than you when it needs to reclaim memory. I also understand that worrying about a few kilobytes of data is silly. I also understand that even megabytes of data isn't what it was a few years back. But still, 1.5 gigabytes? And you know there's like 1.5 GB of data hanging around in memory; it's not like it's a shot in the dark. Is System.gc() systematically bad, or is there some point at which it becomes okay?

So the question is actually double:

Why is or isn't it bad practice to call System.gc()? Is it really merely a hint to the JVM under certain implementations, or is it always a full collection cycle? Are there really garbage collector implementations that can do their work without stopping the world? Please shed some light over the various assertions people have made in the comments to my answer.
Where's the threshold? Is it never a good idea to call System.gc(), or are there times when it's acceptable? If so, what are those times?

Best Answer

The reason everyone always says to avoid System.gc() is that it is a pretty good indicator of fundamentally broken code. Any code that depends on it for correctness is certainly broken; any that rely on it for performance are most likely broken.

You don't know what sort of garbage collector you are running under. There are certainly some that do not "stop the world" as you assert, but some JVMs aren't that smart or for various reasons (perhaps they are on a phone?) don't do it. You don't know what it's going to do.

Also, it's not guaranteed to do anything. The JVM may just entirely ignore your request.

The combination of "you don't know what it will do," "you don't know if it will even help," and "you shouldn't need to call it anyway" are why people are so forceful in saying that generally you shouldn't call it. I think it's a case of "if you need to ask whether you should be using this, you shouldn't"

EDIT to address a few concerns from the other thread:

After reading the thread you linked, there's a few more things I'd like to point out. First, someone suggested that calling gc() may return memory to the system. That's certainly not necessarily true - the Java heap itself grows independently of Java allocations.

As in, the JVM will hold memory (many tens of megabytes) and grow the heap as necessary. It doesn't necessarily return that memory to the system even when you free Java objects; it is perfectly free to hold on to the allocated memory to use for future Java allocations.

To show that it's possible that System.gc() does nothing, view:

http://bugs.sun.com/view_bug.do?bug_id=6668279

and in particular that there's a -XX:DisableExplicitGC VM option.

Related Solutions

Java – reflection and why is it useful

The name reflection is used to describe code which is able to inspect other code in the same system (or itself).

For example, say you have an object of an unknown type in Java, and you would like to call a 'doSomething' method on it if one exists. Java's static typing system isn't really designed to support this unless the object conforms to a known interface, but using reflection, your code can look at the object and find out if it has a method called 'doSomething' and then call it if you want to.

So, to give you a code example of this in Java (imagine the object in question is foo) :

Method method = foo.getClass().getMethod("doSomething", null);
method.invoke(foo, null);

One very common use case in Java is the usage with annotations. JUnit 4, for example, will use reflection to look through your classes for methods tagged with the @Test annotation, and will then call them when running the unit test.

There are some good reflection examples to get you started at http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/reflect/index.html

And finally, yes, the concepts are pretty much similar in other statically typed languages which support reflection (like C#). In dynamically typed languages, the use case described above is less necessary (since the compiler will allow any method to be called on any object, failing at runtime if it does not exist), but the second case of looking for methods which are marked or work in a certain way is still common.

Update from a comment:

The ability to inspect the code in the system and see object types is not reflection, but rather Type Introspection. Reflection is then the ability to make modifications at runtime by making use of introspection. The distinction is necessary here as some languages support introspection, but do not support reflection. One such example is C++

Java – When does System.gc() do something

In practice, it usually decides to do a garbage collection. The answer varies depending on lots of factors, like which JVM you're running on, which mode it's in, and which garbage collection algorithm it's using.

I wouldn't depend on it in your code. If the JVM is about to throw an OutOfMemoryError, calling System.gc() won't stop it, because the garbage collector will attempt to free as much as it can before it goes to that extreme. The only time I've seen it used in practice is in IDEs where it's attached to a button that a user can click, but even there it's not terribly useful.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Java – reflection and why is it useful

Java – When does System.gc() do something

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