Garbage collection

[venkatesh pendharkar]

hi,
I am preaparing for scjp exam .In one of the Mocks i found this question.Can anyone help me in explaining this question.

Q.Which statements about Garbage Collection are true?
1.You can directly free the memory allocated by an object.
2.You can directly run the garbage Collection whenever you want.
3.The Garbage Collector informs your object when it is about to be garbage Collected.
4.Garbage Collector runs in low memory situation.

The answer given is 3 &4.I dont understand the meaning of 3rd option and also i feel 2nd option is correct because we can run garbage collection by calling Sytem.gc() method.
Can anyone please help me in this

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

SCJP questions go in the SCJP forum. I'll move this there for you.

[Keith Lynn]

Originally posted by venkatesh pendharkar:
hi,
I am preaparing for scjp exam .In one of the Mocks i found this question.Can anyone help me in explaining this question.

Q.Which statements about Garbage Collection are true?
1.You can directly free the memory allocated by an object.
2.You can directly run the garbage Collection whenever you want.
3.The Garbage Collector informs your object when it is about to be garbage Collected.
4.Garbage Collector runs in low memory situation.

The answer given is 3 &4.I dont understand the meaning of 3rd option and also i feel 2nd option is correct because we can run garbage collection by calling Sytem.gc() method.
Can anyone please help me in this

You can call System.gc(), but that is not a guarantee that the garbage collector will run.

Before an object is garbage collected, its finalizer method will run (provided that the finalizer method has not been run already).

[Tim LeMaster]

System.gc() is a suggestion to the JVM, so the statement you can directly run it is false.

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/lang/Runtime.html#gc()

The meaning of 3 is the object about to be garbage collected is somehow told this is about to happen. This notification is in the form of calling finalize() on it.

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/lang/Object.html#finalize()

[Sanjeev Singh]

Originally posted by venkatesh pendharkar

Q.Which statements about Garbage Collection are true?
1.You can directly free the memory allocated by an object.
2.You can directly run the garbage Collection whenever you want.
3.The Garbage Collector informs your object when it is about to be garbage Collected.
4.Garbage Collector runs in low memory situation.

(2) is not correct as by calling the System.gc() or Runtime.getRuntime().gc(),you are just requesting the JVM to run the garbage collector.It is upto the JVM discretion to run the garbage collector.It may or may not run the GC at all.
(3) The kind of information it is talking about is to run the object finalize() method.