Arne Vajh?j wrote:
Frank Cisco wrote:
"Frank Cisco" <tdyjkdftyujdtjyj@dtyjdtyjdtyjdty.com> wrote in message
news:AKYPl.30116$0V4.28184@newsfe25.ams2...
If you null and object ie. obj = null, when is it cleared from
memory? Immediately or at the next garbage collection?
Cheers for the responses. I guess the only way to say whether this is
an effective practice is to see how the GC does it's work - maybe
helping the GC out isn't such a bad idea. I've noticed a lot of null
setting in the core java APIs - so it can't be that harmful. Anyone
from Sun Microsystems about?
I would say that it is very bad practice as a general practice (few
exceptions are covered previously).
It is certainly code clutter.
And it is more likely to decrease performance than to increase it.
So it is choosing both the plague and cholera.
Without looking at the source and seeing why various references are
being set to null, we have no idea of whether that's being done in a
(misguided) attempt to help out GC, or whether it's being done simply to
set a reference to null. There are, after all, reasons why you'd set a
reference to null - it's a legitimate value for a reference variable.
In any case, isn't it a bit of a strong statement that setting
references to null is going to decrease performance?