Infinite loop or deadlock in finalize()

[Victor Ho]

I am curious what would happen when you have an infinite loop or deadlock in finalize().

My guess is that the daemon GC thread will get hung up and as time goes on, heap space runs out which leads to OutOfMemory exception.

Any thoughts or more accurate knowledge on this?

Thanks
Victor

[James Carman]

Why not try it yourself...

  
public class TestFinalizer
{
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
 
        TestFinalizer obj = new TestFinalizer();
        obj = null;
        final Collection objects = new LinkedList();
        while (true)
        {
            objects.add(new String("Hello, World!"));
        }
 
    }
 
    public void finalize()
    {
        System.out.println("I'm being finalized!");
        while (true);
    }
}

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

I debugged one of these, quite a few years ago. It was a CORBA program (on OrbixWeb) and somebody indirectly made a network call in finalize(). This led to a deadlock, and a messy debugging problem in a server process. We eventually had a rule that you couldn't write finalize() in any class on that project.