Item 7: Eliminate obsolete object references

In JAVA, your job as a programmer was made much easier by the fact that your objects are automatically reclaimed when you’re through with them.
// Can you spot the "memory leak"?
public class Stack {
    private Object[] elements;
    private int size = 0;
    private static final int DEFAULT_INITIAL_CAPACITY = 16;

    public Stack() {
        elements = new Object[DEFAULT_INITIAL_CAPACITY];
    }

    public void push(Object e) {
        ensureCapacity();
        elements[size++] = e;
    }

    public Object pop() {
        if (size == 0)
            throw new EmptyStackException();
        return elements[--size];
    }

    /**
     * Ensure space for at least one more element, roughly
     * doubling the capacity each time the array needs to grow.
     */
    private void ensureCapacity() {
        if (elements.length == size)
            elements = Arrays.copyOf(elements, 2 * size + 1);
    }
}

In extreme cases, such memory leaks can cause disk paging and even program failure with an OutOfMemoryError, but such failures are relatively rare.


Memory leaks in garbage-collected languages (more properly known as unintentional object retentions) are insidious. If an object reference is unintentionally retained, not only is that object excluded from garbage collection, but so too are any objects referenced by that object, and so on. Even if only a few object references are unintentionally retained, many, many objects may be prevented from being garbage collected, with potentially large effects on performance.

public Object pop() {
    if (size == 0)
        throw new EmptyStackException();
    Object result = elements[--size];
    elements[size] = null; // Eliminate obsolete reference
    return result;
}

Nulling out object references should be the exception rather than the norm.

Generally speaking, whenever a class manages its own memory, the programmer should be alert for memory leaks. Whenever an element is freed, any object references contained in the element should be nulled out.

Another common source of memory leaks is caches. Once you put an object reference into a cache, it’s easy to forget that it’s there and leave it in the cache long after it becomes irrelevant. 

There are several solutions to this problem. If you’re lucky enough to implement a cache for which an entry is relevant exactly so long as there are references to its key outside of the cache, represent the cache as a WeakHashMap; entries will be removed automatically after they become obsolete.

Remember that WeakHashMap is useful only if the desired lifetime of cache entries is determined by external references to the key, not the value.

A third common source of memory leaks is listeners and other callbacks. If you implement an API where clients register callbacks but don’t deregister them explicitly, they will accumulate unless you take some action. One way to ensure that callbacks are garbage collected promptly is to store only weak references to them, for instance, by storing them only as keys in a WeakHashMap




Because memory leaks typically do not manifest themselves as obvious failures, they may remain present in a system for years. They are typically discovered only as a result of careful code inspection or with the aid of a debugging tool known as a heap profiler. Therefore, it is very desirable to learn to anticipate problems like this before they occur and prevent them from happening.