Well as long as you're quoting the API, why not include the very first line of the description for System.gc(): "Runs the garbage collector." And the third sentence: "When control returns from the method call, the Java Virtual Machine
has made a best effort to reclaim space from all discarded objects." The way I see, it, you are
running the garbage collector the moment you call System.gc(). You can't guarantee that it will produce any concreate results - the call may return without accomplishing anything. But it will at least
try, and that "trying" constitutes "running" as far as I'm concerned. However, the
word "run" seems to mean different things to different people, and this particular question is impossible to really answer definitively because there is no agreement as to what it really means. Fortunately, it has been reported that real
test questions on this topic are much less ambiguous, so don't worry too much about it.