On Saturdays I tend to wake up at noon and just read leisurely, not being prepared to do much more, except catch up with the outside world. Paul Wilson posted an interesting series of articles on .NET garbage collection, where he describes some issues with the subject, discovers certain memory leaks within .NET Framework and compares the .NET implementation to Java.
- .NET Memory Management and Garbage Collection
- .NET GC Myth #1 – Set Object to Null
- .NET GC Myth #2 – The GC Frees Memory
- .NET GC Best Practice – ALWAYS Call Dispose
- .NET GC is Excellent – Better Than Java
While discussing the issues of .NET garbage collection and especially comparing the collector to Java, it’s worth remembering that while Microsoft provides the implementation of its GC, Sun Micro documented the specs for the GC and the actual garbage collection is implemented by whoever published JVM. Theoretically thus the issues described with Java GC do not relate to JVMs from IBM and other vendors. I have not actually looked into the alternative JVMs, just consider it a fair warning to anyone who brings up the subject of JVM GC performance.
