Understanding the Reference Handler thread

Question

I am continuing my path to deep understanding of Java Thread. Unfortunately my Java Certification didn\'t cover that part, so the only way of learning is to post a series of dum

Answer 1

1) The Finalizer Thread calls finalizer methods. The Reference Thread has a similar purpose.

http://www.java2s.com/Open-Source/Java-Document/6.0-JDK-Core/lang/java/lang/ref/Reference.java.htm

The OpenJDK source states its is a

High-priority thread to enqueue pending References

The GC creates a simple linked list of references which need to be processed and this thread quickly adds them to a proper queue. The reason this is done in two phases is that the GC does nothing but find the References, this thread calls code which handles those references e.g. Call Cleaners, and notifies ReferenceQueue listeners.

2) A lock is acquired for a synchronized method before it is entered.

3-5) covered by Joachim ;)