I'm guessing this isn't possible...but here goes. My understanding is that eden space is cheaper to collect than old gen space, especially when you start getting into very large heaps. Large heaps tend to come up with long running applications (server apps) and server apps a lot of the time want to use some kind of caches. Caches with some kind of eviction (LRU) tend to defeat some assumptions that GC makes (temporary objects die quickly). So cache evictions end up filling up old gen faster than you'd like and you end up with a more costly old gen collection.

Now, it seems like this sort of thing could be avoided if java provided a way to mark a reference as about to die (delete keyword)? The difference between this and c++ is that the use is optional. And calling delete does not actually delete the object, but rather is a hint to the GC that it should demote the object back to Eden space (where it will be more easily collected). I'm guessing this feature doesn't exist, but, why not (is there a reason it's a bad idea)?