Yourkit profiler - option to force GC

[Suma Rangaraj]

Hello all-

I am confused with the option that is given in Yourkit profiler. They have an option to explicitly force GC before taking a snapshot of memory.
Haven't we told time again that a GC cannot be forced? So what does this option mean?

Thanks!

[Chris Hurst]

Its not guaranteed to work but does (Sun VM) unless you explicitly disable it with a command line option (DisableExplicitGC). (You need to check your VM's documentation or just do it and observe the results ;-) )

Attach visual WM and force a GC and you can see the results, we do it all the time for debugging purposes.

Obviously writing a program relying on this behaviour is different, there's no guarantee it'll do anything.