What is the garbage collector in Java?

Question

I am new to Java and confused about the garbage collector in Java. What does it actually do and when does it comes into action. Please describe some of the properties of the

Answer 1

Garbage collector can be viewed as a reference count manager. if an object is created and its reference is stored in a variable, its reference count is increased by one. during the course of execution if that variable is assigned with NULL. reference count for that object is decremented. so the current reference count for the object is 0. Now when Garbage collector is executed, It checks for the objects with reference count 0. and frees the resources allocated to it.

Garbage collector invocation is controlled by garbage collection policies.

You can get some data here. http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/gc-tuning-5-138395.html