For the visually minded, here's a parable by Kieron Briggs:

Picture a big empty room with a big furnace/incinerator type thing at one end. Hanging form the roof are a number of ropes, called Threads. Attached to the various threads are little sparkly Objects, and those Objects can have other Object attached to them in turn by little rods called References. This creates a (hopefully) beautiful structure of Objects all attaches (either directly or indirectly) to a Thread. You can even have Objects which link to more than one Thread.

When an Object isn't needed any more, the Reference to it disappears. If that leaves the Object (or a whole collection of Objects) unattached to any Thread, it will fall down onto the floor and shatter. This gradually builds up a layer of broken objects lying around the floor. In a language like C, eventually the floor would become so full that there was no room for more Objects, and Bad Things would happen.

But in Java, we have a Garbage Collector. This is a little dude in overalls that climbs down a special Staff Only Thread, sweeps up all the broken Objects on the floor, and shovels them into the incinerator. You never know exactly when he's going to come along, but he's always there keeping an eye on the mess on the floor to make sure that it doesn't fill up too much...

• more formal description: mark-and-sweep algorithm

For the visually minded, here's a parable by Kieron Briggs:

Picture a big empty room with a big furnace/incinerator type thing at one end. Hanging form the roof are a number of ropes, called Threads. Attached to the various threads are little sparkly Objects, and those Objects can have other Object attached to them in turn by little rods called References. This creates a (hopefully) beautiful structure of Objects all attaches (either directly or indirectly) to a Thread. You can even have Objects which link to more than one Thread.

When an Object isn't needed any more, the Reference to it disappears. If that leaves the Object (or a whole collection of Objects) unattached to any Thread, it will fall down onto the floor and shatter. This gradually builds up a layer of broken objects lying around the floor. In a language like C, eventually the floor would become so full that there was no room for more Objects, and Bad Things would happen.

But in Java, we have a Garbage Collector. This is a little dude in overalls that climbs down a special Staff Only Thread, sweeps up all the broken Objects on the floor, and shovels them into the incinerator. You never know exactly when he's going to come along, but he's always there keeping an eye on the mess on the floor to make sure that it doesn't fill up too much...

• more formal description: mark-and-sweep algorithm

^{...each object in memory has a flag (typically a single bit) reserved for garbage collection use only. This flag is always cleared, except during the collection cycle. The first stage of collection does a tree traversal of the entire 'root set', marking each object that is pointed to as being 'in-use'. All objects that those objects point to, and so on, are marked as well, so that every object that is ultimately pointed to from the root set is marked. Finally, all memory is scanned from start to finish, examining all free or used blocks; those with the in-use flag still cleared are not reachable by any program or data, and their memory is freed. (For objects which are marked in-use, the in-use flag is cleared again, preparing for the next cycle.)}