Question

You can garbage collect in Java simply by calling System.gc() but sometimes this “stalls” the application. Is it a bad idea to garbage collect like this and avoid stalls:

new Thread(new Runnable() {
   public void run() { 
      System.gc(); 
   }
}).start();

Or might this lead to even more problems?

Answer 1

Yes, most times it is a very bad idea to call System.gc(). There are exceptions but they are few and it is mostly better to spend the time making sure you are not doing things that hurt performance in a GC environment and to study and make sure you understand how a gc works than to try to handle it yourself by explicitly calling System.gc().