garbage collection

A software routine that searches memory for areas of inactive data and instructions in order to reclaim that space for the general memory pool (the heap). Operating systems may or may not provide this feature. For example, Windows does not do automatic garbage collection which requires that the programmer specifically deallocates memory in order to release it.

Move It to Disk or Deallocate
If a program continues to allocate memory for data buffers and eventually exceeds the physical memory capacity, the operating system then has to place parts of the program in virtual memory (on disk) in order to continue, which slows down processing. Deallocating memory after a routine no longer needs it is a tedious task and programmers often forget to do it or do not do it properly. Java performs automatic garbage collection without programmer intervention, which eliminates this coding headache. See dynamic memory allocation, heap and Java.

garbage collection [′gär·bij kə‚lek·shən]

(computer science)

In a computer program with dynamic storage allocation, the automatic process of identifying those memory cells whose contents are no longer useful for the computation in progress and then making them available for some other use.

(programming)

garbage collection - (GC) The process by which dynamically allocated storage is reclaimed during the execution of a program. The term usually refers to automatic periodic storage reclamation by the garbage collector (part of the run-time system), as opposed to explicit code to free specific blocks of memory.

Automatic garbage collection is usually triggered during memory allocation when the amount free memory falls below some threshold or after a certain number of allocations. Normal execution is suspended and the garbage collector is run. There are many variations on this basic scheme.

Languages like Lisp represent expressions as graphs built from cells which contain pointers and data. These languages use automatic dynamic storage allocation to build expressions. During the evaluation of an expression it is necessary to reclaim space which is used by subexpressions but which is no longer pointed to by anything. This reclaimed memory is returned to the free memory pool for subsequent reallocation.

Without garbage collection the program's memory requirements would increase monotonically throughout execution, possibly exceeding system limits on virtual memory size.

The three main methods are mark-sweep garbage collection, reference counting and copying garbage collection.

See also the AI koan about garbage collection.