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Garbage Collection
What is Garbage Collection?
In general layman term, Garbage collection (GC) is nothing but collecting or gaining the memory back which has been allocated to the objects, which is not in use at the moment in any part of our program. A brief description as below.
Garbage collection is the process in which programs try to free up memory space that is no longer used by objects, and such. Garbage collection is implemented differently for every language. Most high-level programming languages have some sort of garbage collection built it. Low-level programming languages may add garbage collection through libraries.
As said above, every programming language has their own way of GC. In C programming, developers need to take care of memory allocation and deallocation using malloc() and dealloc() functions. C# developers don't need to take care of GC and is not recommended either.
How memory allocation happening?
In C#, memory allocation of objects happens in managed heap. which takes care by CLR (common language runtime). Memory allocation for the heap is done through win32 dll in OS as like in the C. But, In C objects are placed in memory where ever the free space suits the size of object. The memory mapping works based on Linkedlist concepts. In C#, memory allocation for heap is happening in linear order like one after another.
Whenever a new object is being created, a chunk of memory is allocated in the heap and the pointer moved to next memory address. Memory allocation in C# is faster than the C. Since, in C the memory need to search and allocate for the object. so it will take a bit higher time than C#.
Generations in C# GC?
In .NET programming, heap has three generations called generation 0, 1, 2. Generation 0 gets filled first whenever new object is created. Garbage collector is executed when the Generation 0 gets filled. Newly created objects are placed in Generation 0. While performing garbage collection all the unused objects are destroyed, memory gets freed and compacted. GC takes care of clearing the pointers of freed memory once GC is executed.
Generations 1 and 2 has object which has the longer life time. GC on generations 1 and 2 will not happen until the generations 0 has sufficient memory to allocate.
Its not advisable to invoke the GC programmatically. It's good to let it happen on its own. GC gets called whenever the generation 0 gets filled. GC will not impact the performance of your program.
Garbage collection is the process in which programs try to free up memory space that is no longer used by variables, objects, and such. Garbage collection is implemented differently for every language. Most high-level programming languages have some sort of garbage collection built in. Low-level programming languages may add garbage collection through libraries.
Garbage collection is a tool that saves time for the programmer, for example it replaces the need for functions such as malloc() and free() which are found in C. It can also help in preventing memory leaks.
The downside of garbage collection is that it has a negative impact on performance. The program has to regularly run though the program, checking object references and cleaning out memory - this takes up resources and often requires the program to pause.
If an object has no references (is no longer reachable) then it is eligible for garbage collection. For example in the Java code below, the Thing object originally referenced by 'thing1' has its one and only reference redirected to another object on the heap - it is then unreachable and will have its memory unallocated by the garbage collector.
class Useless {
public static void main (String[] args) {
Thing thing1 = new Thing();
Thing thing2 = new Thing();
thing2 = thing1; // direct thing2's reference towards thing1
// no references access thing2
} }
One example of garbage collection is ARC, short for automatic reference counting. This is used in Swift, for example. ARC boils down to keeping track of the references to all objects that are created. If the amount of references drops to 0, the object will be marked for deallocation.
More Information:
- https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/garbage-collection/fundamentals - To know more about garbage Collection