Overview of memory management

Memory management contains the Garbage Collector and the Allocator. It is responsible for allocating memory in addition to collecting garbage. Because the task of memory allocation is small, compared to that of garbage collection, the term garbage collection usually also means memory management.

The Garbage Collector allocates areas of storage in the heap. These areas of storage define Java™ objects. When allocated, an object continues to be live while a reference (pointer) to it exists somewhere in the JVM; therefore the object is reachable. When an object ceases to be referenced from the active state, it becomes garbage and can be reclaimed for reuse. When this reclamation occurs, the Garbage Collector must process a possible finalizer and also ensure that any internal JVM resources that are associated with the object are returned to the pool of such resources.