Strong,Soft,Weak and Phantom References in Java

If you read any documentation on Java garbage collection, the term "strong/weak/soft/phantom reference"  crops up quite frequently. It's easy to guess what strong references are, but what the heck is a phantom/weak/soft reference?

I stumbled on a very informative post about each of the reference types at http://weblogs.java.net/blog/enicholas/archive/2006/05/understanding_w.html. It is an article that perhaps every Java programmer not familiar with this topic should read.  To quote the author of the article: "If you don't know what they are, how will you know when to use them?"

 

I am paraphrasing the main contents of the article below for posterity and for my own reference:

Strong references:

Just like it says on the tin, the vanilla object references that we are all used to. For example, in the following code snippet, someClassObj and someOtherObj are both strong references.

 

public class SomeClass
{
     private SomeObject someOtherObject = new SomeObject();
     ...
     ...

     public static void main(String[] args)
     {
          SomeClass someClassObj = new SomeClass();
          ...
          ...
     }
}

As long as there is a strong reference to an object, it cannot be garbage collected.

 

Weak References

In certain situations, strong references can be a pain to manage and lead to nasty memory leaks. Imagine a global object cache where object references are stored for faster retrieval. The burden is on the programmer to manage the memory used by the cache. If objects that are no longer needed elsewhere are not removed from the cache manually, they will keep keep using memory unnecessarily. As far as the garbage collector is concerned, these objects are still alive because the cache is holding strong references to them.  Therefore, the programmer ends up doing extra work to manage the memory used by the program.

The above unfortunate situation can be made much better by offloading bulk of the work to the garbage collector itself. The way to achieve this is to store weak references in the cache. Weak references are a hint to the garbage collector that the memory occupied by those objects can be reclaimed if no other links to them are found during the link traversal phase of the collector.

 

WeakReference myWeakReference = new WeakReference(someClassObj);
objectRef = myWeakReference.get();

The get method of the weak reference object will return null if the object that it points to has been garbage collected. This takes care of the memory used by the unused object, but what about the WeakReference object itself? ReferenceQueue to the rescue!

ReferenceQueue refQueue = new ReferenceQueue();
WeakReference myWeakReference1 = new WeakReference(someClassObj1,refQueue);
WeakReference myWeakReference2 = new WeakReference(someClassObj2,refQueue);

If a reference to a ReferenceQueue object is passed to the WeakReference object when it is constructed, the garbage collector will automatically put the WeakReference object into the queue once the object is garbage collected. Now all we need to do is to periodically look through the reference queue and dispose of any useless weak refs.
Java provides a handy WeakHashMap class that automatically handles the cleanup when it's entries are garbage collected.

 

Soft References

Soft references are a less eager form of weak references. Generally, objects pointed to by soft references will stay in memory as long as there's enough memory to go around.

 

Phantom References

The main difference between a weak and a phantom reference is that the get method of a phantom reference will always return null.  The get method of a weak reference returning null does not necessarily mean that the pointed object is removed from the memory. The garbage collector is yet to call the finalizer on that object, and hence there is a slim chance that the object could resurrect itself by virtue of having a weird finalize method that creates a strong reference to it.

Objects pointed to be phantom references  have had their finalizers executed and are already physically removed from memory. Therefore, phantom refs only serve to indicate that a certain piece of memory has been reclaimed.