Does it help GC to null local variables in Java

Question

I was \'forced\' to add myLocalVar = null; statement into finally clause just before leaving method. Reason is to help GC. I was told I will get SMS\'s during n

Answer 1

There was an old piece of Sun documentation, Java Platform Performance (link sadly now broken, and I haven't been able to find a new one), which described a situation where nulling a local variable which dropped out of scope actually had an effect on the GC.

However, the paper referred to a very old version of java. As mentioned in this question (which also contains a précis of the problem described in the paper), this no longer affects current JVM implementations.