Book Image

Java Memory Management

By : Maaike van Putten, Dr. Seán Kennedy
Book Image

Java Memory Management

By: Maaike van Putten, Dr. Seán Kennedy

Overview of this book

Understanding how Java organizes memory is important for every Java professional, but this particular topic is a common knowledge gap for many software professionals. Having in-depth knowledge of memory functioning and management is incredibly useful in writing and analyzing code, as well as debugging memory problems. In fact, it can be just the knowledge you need to level up your skills and career. In this book, you’ll start by working through the basics of Java memory. After that, you’ll dive into the different segments individually. You’ll explore the stack, the heap, and the Metaspace. Next, you’ll be ready to delve into JVM standard garbage collectors. The book will also show you how to tune, monitor and profile JVM memory management. Later chapters will guide you on how to avoid and spot memory leaks. By the end of this book, you’ll have understood how Java manages memory and how to customize it for the benefit of your applications.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Avoiding Memory Leaks

In the previous chapter, we examined how to configure and monitor memory management in the JVM. This involved knowledge of the metrics relevant to the tuning of the JVM. We discussed how to obtain these metrics and, consequently, how to tune the JVM. We also examined how to use profiling to obtain insights into the effects of tuning.

This chapter focuses on memory leaks. We will examine memory leaks under the following headings:

  • Understanding memory leaks
  • Spotting memory leaks
  • Avoiding memory leaks

Let us start with understanding memory leaks. After that, we will learn how to spot them in our code and see how to avoid and solve them.