what is garbage collection ?

Garbage collection is the process of automatically freeing objects that are no longer referenced by the program. This frees the programmer from having to keep track of when to free allocated memory, thereby preventing many potential bugs and headaches.

The name "garbage collection" implies that objects that are no longer needed by the program are "garbage" and can be thrown away. A more accurate and up-to-date metaphor might be "memory recycling." When an object is no longer referenced by the program, the heap space it occupies must be recycled so that the space is available for subsequent new objects. The garbage collector must somehow determine which objects are no longer referenced by the program and make available the heap space occupied by such unreferenced objects. In the process of freeing unreferenced objects, the garbage collector must run any finalizers of objects being freed.

In addition to freeing unreferenced objects, a garbage collector may also combat heap fragmentation. Heap fragmentation occurs through the course of normal program execution. New objects are allocated, and unreferenced objects are freed such that free blocks of heap memory are left in between blocks occupied by live objects. Requests to allocate new objects may have to be filled by extending the size of the heap even though there is enough total unused space in the existing heap. This will happen if there is not enough contiguous free heap space available into which the new object will fit. On a virtual memory system, the extra paging required to service an ever growing heap can degrade the performance of the executing program.

In a computer program with dynamic storage allocation, the automatic process of identifying those memory cells whose contents are no longer useful for the computation in progress and then making them available for some other use.