Is eclipse's Garbage Collector different than the default?
- by Savvas Dalkitsis
From questions posted here and an old one of mine I have created the impression that you cannot explicitly run the Java Garbage Collector whenever you please.
If you call it, you simply instruct the system to call it whenever it can or thinks is appropriate.
But in eclipse, if you press the "Run Garbage Collector" button you see an immediate reduction in memory usage. How is that possible? Is eclipse using a different Garbage Collector, does it have access to some secret API that we don't or is my conception of how the GC works wrong?