Garbage collector makes a object garph using managed heap and Roots

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When the garbage collector starts running, it makes the assumption that all objects in the heap are garbage. In other words, it assumes that none of the application's roots refer to any objects in the heap. Now, the garbage collector starts walking the roots and building a graph of all objects reachable from the roots.

What are the roots in this whole process???

Posted 5-Jan-14 17:37pm

Parmod Jangra

Updated 6-Jan-14 5:17am

Ron Beyer

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Ron Beyer 5-Jan-14 23:41pm

What language are we talking about? .NET? Java? Other? Please tag your post with the appropriate language tags.

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Ron Beyer · Accepted Answer · 2014-01-06T05:16:00

Solution 1

I'm not sure where you read that, but I would go through all these topics so you can fully understand .NET Garbage Collection:

MSDN .NET Garbage Collection[^]

If you don't read them all, at least read this one:

.NET Garbage Collection Fundamentals[^]

Posted 6-Jan-14 5:16am

Ron Beyer

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Parmod Jangra 9-Jan-14 12:23pm

Thanks Ron for your quick reply. Please refer this link :
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/bb985010.aspx

Ron Beyer 9-Jan-14 12:51pm

That article is so old I wouldn't trust the information in it to apply to the newer versions of .NET. Its probably written for .NET 1.0 which was short lived.

Parmod Jangra 9-Jan-14 21:41pm

Ok Ron, But an interviewer asked me this question so I am curious to find out this.

Ron Beyer 9-Jan-14 21:44pm

I think your interviewer is confused on how .NET garbage collection works. The garbage collector does not rebuild the object graph each time it runs.

Parmod Jangra 9-Jan-14 22:36pm

Ok, But first time how Gc knows which ojects are live or not?

Ron Beyer 9-Jan-14 22:42pm

Please read these articles. In particular, article 4 goes over what is defined as the "marking phase" in GC where it determines what objects are live. Since the GC takes care of all allocation and deallocation on the heap, it is reference counting and can know what objects are alive or dead.

Parmod Jangra 10-Jan-14 0:23am

Thanks Ron but I think reference Counting was the old process the GC used, Now it uses the Reference Tracking Algo, Please correct if I am wrong.

Ron Beyer 10-Jan-14 0:27am

All I can say is that it uses the methods in the links I posted, the MSDN documentation identifies the current method for GC, and I'm not sure its changed since .NET 2, other than 4.5 when it moved to working on a background thread instead of a foreground one.