Working of Garbage collector

[Dash Abhisek]

Hi All,

Am I right on these two points:-

1>Any object whose reference variable is accessible by any live thread (daemon or user) be it a weak, strong, soft reference type is not eligible to be gced.

2>After the first condition is applied the GC has a knowledge of the objects that it can take out of memory and from this lot of objects first gc will try to get rid of weak then soft then strong.

Please correct me if Iam wrong.

Thanks,
Abhisek

[Campbell Ritchie]

I think you may be mistaken about weak references. Have a look in the API for WeakReference and SoftReference. As far as I remember, there is a full explanation in those links. There is also something called PhantomReference. You would do well to look at that too. Also the links in those links.

[Monu Tripathi]

As an aside, you can also read this: it discusses Garbage collection process in general.