Github user vanzin commented on the pull request: https://github.com/apache/spark/pull/1387#issuecomment-49065130 I'm not sure I understood your last comment, but anyway: these object had references to them at some point. What you're suggesting is that, at some point, those references stopped existing, but there's still clean up that needs to be done. And if you're doing that clean up by using the gc, it means the cleanup is happening in a finalizer, which is bad. That means there is a bug in the code that is getting rid of those references: it should be doing this cleanup. This is no different than having to call `close()` on an InputStream. Yes, you can not do it and leave it for the GC to invoke finalizers, but that's wrong. Your code should explicitly close the streams. Unless I'm misunderstanding what you're trying to achieve. But regardless of what that is, `System.gc()` is *not* the answer.
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