Garbage Collection

Garbage collection is the name programmers give to the process by which programs free up memory space that is no longer used by objects. So by collecting memory which has been previously allocated to objects, but which is not currently in use in any part of our program we are effectively 'recycling memory'.

Conditions for a garbage collection

Garbage collection occurs when one of the following conditions is true:

The system has low physical memory. (This is detected by either the low memory notification from the OS or low memory as indicated by the host).

The memory that's used by allocated objects on the managed heap surpasses an acceptable threshold. This threshold is continuously adjusted as the process runs.

The GC.Collect method is called. This is rarely used as in virtually all cases the garbage collector runs continuously. This method is primarily used for unique situations and testing.

Garbage collection is implemented differently for every language.

Most high-level programming languages have some sort of garbage collection built in.

Memory allocation and deallocation methods in Python are automatic. (Click on the graphic to find out what commands relate to garbage collection within Python).

Python uses two automatic strategies for memory reallocation:

Reference counting Garbage collection Prior to Python version 2.0, the Python interpreter only used reference counting for memory management. Reference counting works by counting the number of times an object is referenced by other objects in the system. When references to an object are removed, the reference count for an object is decremented. When the reference count becomes zero, the object is deallocated.

Automatic Garbage Collection of Cycles Because reference cycles take computational work to discover, garbage collection must be a scheduled activity. Python schedules garbage collection based upon a threshold of object allocations and object deallocations. When the number of allocations minus the number of deallocations is greater than the threshold number, the garbage collector is run. One can inspect the threshold for new objects (objects in Python known as generation 0 objects) by importing the gc module and asking for garbage collection thresholds.

Manual Garbage Collection - invoking the garbage collector manually during the execution of a program can also be implemented in python to free memory being consumed by reference cycles.

There are two ways for performing manual garbage collection:

Time-based where the garbage collector is called after a fixed time interval.

Event-based calls the garbage collector on event occurrence - e.g. when a user exits the application or when the application enters into idle state.

In C programming, developers need to take care of memory allocation and deallocation using malloc() and dealloc() functions - which are to do with memory allocation and the deallocation of that memory. The user has to preallocate or deallocate memory using dynamic memory allocation in languages such as C or C++.

However, in the case of C# developers don't need to take care of GC - and it's not recommended to try to do so either.

Low-level programming languages may add garbage collection through libraries.

 

Advantages and Disadvantages of GC

Garbage collection is a tool that saves time for programmers. For example it replaces the need for functions such as malloc() and free() which are found in C.

It can also help in preventing memory leaks.

The downside of garbage collection is that it has a negative impact on performance. This is because GC has to regularly run though the program, checking object references and cleaning out memory. This takes up resources and often requires the program to pause.

When should the program do it?

If an object has no references (is no longer reachable) then it is eligible for garbage collection.

For example in the Java code below, the 'Thing object' originally referenced by 'thing1' has its one and only reference redirected to another object on the heap. This means it is then unreachable and will have its memory unallocated by the garbage collector.

ARC (Automatic Reference Counting)

ARC is an example of garbage collection. Itis used in Swift, for example. ARC keeps track of the references to all objects that are created. If the number of references drops to 0, the object will be marked for deallocation.

Reference for this information: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/a-guide-to-garbage-collection-in-programming/ and https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/garbage-collection/fundamentals