Efficient Garbage Collection

Question

Consider the following object

class someObject;
{
   public objectA A{get;set;}
   public objectB B{get;set;}
   public objectC C{get;set;}
   public objectD D{get;set;}
   //...
}

at some point ObjectD is not needed anymore but the Instance of someObject still exist and will do so for couple hours, objectD takes up alot of memory so after its role is done i did set it up to null.

• does that mean the memory will get freed from ObjectD as soon as i set it to null?
• if an object sets for so long unused in some scope what does .NET do about it?

Answer 1

does that mean the memory will get freed from ObjectD as soon as I set it to null?

It's not object sets to null - its reference to object in memory sets to null. And object will exist until Garbage Collector will collect it (if you don't have any other references to this object).

Take a look on Fundamentals of Garbage Collection