Xueming Shen wrote: > I'm not a GC guy, so I might be missing something here, but if close() > is being explicitly invoked by some thread, means someone has a strong > reference to it, I don't think the finalize() can kick in until that > close() returns
This is not correct. You can re-publish the reference from another finalizer method and thereby allow another thread to access the object concurrently with the finalizer. Here's a possible sequence of events: 1) GC runs and determines that A and B are finalizable 2) Finalizer thread run A.finalize() 3) A.finalize publishes reference to B in static variable 4a) Another thread reads the static variable and calls B.close() 4b) Finalizer thread runs B.finalize() Regards, Jeroen
