finalize() called on strongly reachable objects in Java 8

Question

We recently upgraded our message processing application from Java 7 to Java 8. Since the upgrade, we get an occasional exception that a stream has been closed while it is b

Answer 1

Your finalizer isn't correct.

Firstly, it doesn't need the catch block, and it must call super.finalize() in its own finally{} block. The canonical form of a finalizer is as follows:

protected void finalize() throws Throwable
{
    try
    {
        // do stuff
    }
    finally
    {
        super.finalize();
    }
}

Secondly, you're assuming you are holding the only reference to m_stream, which may or may not be correct. The m_stream member should finalize itself. But you don't need to do anything to accomplish that. Ultimately m_stream will be a FileInputStream or FileOutputStream or a socket stream, and they already finalize themselves correctly.

I would just remove it.