Question

I have always wondered why the garbage collector in Java activates whenever it feels like it rather than do:

if(obj.refCount == 0)
{
   delete  obj;
}

Are there any big advantages to how Java does it that I overlooked?

Thanks

Answer 1

Each JVM is different, but the HotSpot JVM does not primarily rely on reference counting as a means for garbage collection. Reference counting has the advantage of being simple to implement, but it is inherently error-prone. In particular, if you have a reference cycle (a set of objects that all refer to one another in a cycle), then reference counting will not correctly reclaim those objects because they all have nonzero reference count. This forces you to use an auxiliary garbage collector from time to time, which tends to be slower (Mozilla Firefox had this exact problem, and IIRC their solution was to add in a garbage collector on top of reference counting). This is why, for example, languages like C++ tend to have a combination of shared_ptrs that use reference counting and weak_ptrs that don’t use reference cycles.

Additionally, associating a reference count with each object makes the cost of assigning a reference greater than normal, because of the extra bookkeeping involved of adjusting the reference count (which only gets worse in the presence of multithreading). Furthermore, using reference counting precludes the use of certain types fast of memory allocators, which can be a problem. It also tends to lead to heap fragmentation in its naive form, since objects are scattered through memory rather than tightly-packed, decreasing allocation times and causing poor locality.

The HotSpot JVM uses a variety of different techniques to do garbage collection, but its primary garbage collector is called a stop-and-copy collector. This collector works by allocating objects contiguously in memory next to one another, and allows for extremely fast (one or two assembly instructions) allocation of new objects. When space runs out, all of the new objects are GC’ed simultaneously, which usually kills off most of the new objects that were constructed. As a result, the GC is much faster than a typically reference-counting implementation, and ends up having better locality and better performance.

For a comparison of techniques in garbage collecting, along with a quick overview of how the GC in HotSpot works, you may want to check out these lecture slides from a compilers course that I taught last summer. You may also want to look at the HotSpot garbage collection white paper that goes into much more detail about how the garbage collector works, including ways of tuning the collector on an application-by-application basis.

Hope this helps!