garbage collection?

[srikanth reddy]

 Which of the following statements are true?
1) The automatic garbage collection of the JVM prevents programs from ever running out of memory
2) A program can suggest that garbage collection be performed but not force it
3) Garbage collection is platform independent
4) An object becomes eligible for garbage collection when all references denoting it are set to null. 

here answer is 2,4
how come 4....i read in khalid...that its not neccessary that for the object to be garbage collected u need to set the references to null...dont remember the exact sentence...whats the case with isolation islands..they have the object references but then also they are eligible for GC.

one more doubt ..like in the Which of the following statements are true?sort of questions would b there or else they mention how many to choose??

sri

[Thomas Drew]

srikanth
You are correct that you don't have to set references to null. I thank they were tring to say that garbage collection occurs when there are no longer any vaild reference pointing to the object. This can occur for reason other then setting the reference to null.

[Barry Gaunt]

What is important is that no live program thread has a reference to the island of objects. Then the island of objects is eligible for garbage collection.