I'm not expert on JVM garbage collection routines, so I'm wondering if this code actually does anything useful. I have a need to copy around what might be a large data structure (possibly deep copying, so I'd actually have double the memory usage). Past a certain point in a routine, I don't need copy #1 anymore, and I'm about to call another method that might take some time (it does a network call and won't return until it is done or it times out)
So, does this code help that at all? (Yes, this is heavily pseudo-coded and contrived, but the real code doesn't matter so much as the portion highlighted below)
public void doSomething()
{
List messageList = UtilClass.makeMessageList();
List messageList2 = doDeepCopy(messageList);
// Null out first copy
messageList = null;
doNetworkCall(messageList2)
}
Hopefully you see my intent -- null out the first list, hoping that clues the JVM in that it can reclaim that space. I just don't know if that has any meaningful effects -- I would think that the GC thread runs continuously, and by me removing the only live reference to that data it does now become a candidate for GC. I'm just wondering if I'm missing something.
