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In a lay-man terminology how does the garbage collection mechanism work?
How an object is identified to be available for garbage collection?
Also, what do Reference Counting, Mark and Sweep, Copying, Train mean in GC algorithms?
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In the common language runtime (CLR), the garbage collector (GC) serves as an automatic memory manager. The garbage collector manages the allocation and release of memory for an application. For developers working with managed code, this means that you don't have to write code to perform memory management tasks.
At a certain point in time, an event happens that triggers garbage collection. To clear the memory, application threads have to be stopped. This is where the work of your application stops and the next steps start. The garbage collector marks objects that are no longer used and reclaims the memory.
The gc() method is used to invoke the garbage collector to perform cleanup processing. The gc() is found in System and Runtime classes.
A GC cycle is a repeatable process that involves a set of GC operations. These operations process all or parts of the Java heap. When operating on the whole of the Java heap, the cycle is referred to as a global GC cycle; When operating on part of the heap, the cycle is referred to as a partial GC cycle.
When you use a language with garbage collection you wont get access to the memory directly. Rather you are given access to some abstraction on top of that data. One of the things that is properly abstracted away is the the actual location in memory of the data block, as well as pointers to other datablocks. When the garbage collector runs (this happens occasionally) it will check if you still hold a reference to each of the memory blocks it has allocated for you. If you don't it will free that memory.
The main difference between the different types of garbage collectors is their efficiency as well as any limitations on what kind of allocation schemes they can handle.
The simplest is properly reference counting. When ever you create a reference to an object an internal counter on that object is incremented, when you chance the reference or it is no longer in scope, the counter on the (former) target object is decremented. When this counter reaches zero, the object is no longer referred at all and can be freed.
The problem with reference counting garbage collectors is that they cannot deal with circular data. If object A has a reference to object B and that in turn has some (direct or indirect) reference to object A, they can never be freed, even if none of the objects in the chain are refereed outside the chain (and therefore aren't accessible to the program at all).
The Mark and sweep algorithm on the other hand can handle this. The mark and sweep algorithm works by periodically stopping the execution of the program, mark each item the program has allocated as unreachable. The program then runs through all the variables the program has and marks what they point to as reachable. If either of these allocations contain references to other data in the program, that data is then likewise marked as reachable, etc.
This is the mark part of the algorithm. At this point everything the program can access, no matter how indirectly, is marked as reachable and everything the program can't reach is marked as unreachable. The garbage collector can now safely reclaim the memory associated with the objects marked as unreachable.
The problem with the mark and sweep algorithm is that it isn't that efficient -- the entire program has to be stopped to run it, and a lot of the object references aren't going to change.
To improve on this, the mark and sweep algorithm can be extended with so called "generational garbage collection". In this mode objects that have been in the system for some number of garbage collections are promoted to the old generation, which is not checked that often.
This improves efficiency because objects tend to die young (think of a string being changed inside a loop, resulting in perhaps a lifetime of a few hundred cycles) or live very long (the objects used to represent the main window of an application, or the database connection of a servlet).
Much more detailed information can be found on wikipedia.
Added based on comments:
With the mark and sweep algorithm (as well as any other garbage collection algorithm except reference counting) the garbage collection do not run in the context of your program, since it has to be able to access stuff that your program is not capable of accessing directly. Therefore it is not correct to say that the garbage collector runs on the stack.
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The garbage collector for the CLR is described in this slidedeck. "Roots" on slide 15 are the sources for the objects that first go into the graph. Their member fields and so on are used to find the other objects in the graph.
Wikipedia describes several of these approaches in much more and better detail.
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