What Is Automatic Memory Management (AMM)?

The world is full of things you have to remember to do. You have to remember to brush your teeth, eat your vegetables, and call your parents back. You must remember that you need an umbrella if it looks like rain, or you'll be late for your dentist appointment if you don't leave now. You also need to remember not to forget about all these things, or else they'll happen—and then where you will be? But some things don't need remembering—something that should be automatic. Like memory management in your application! It's easy for developers to forget about freeing their objects' memory when the system does it automatically behind the scenes. That's why automatic memory management (AMM) is so great: it saves developers from worrying about freeing their own objects' memory while concentrating on making their applications awesome! Oracle has proprietary AMM parameters, such as PGA_AGGREGATE_TARGET and SGA_TARGET. Oracle uses two initialization parameters to configure AMM, MEMORY_TARGET and LOG_BUFFER. The first initialization parameter, MEMORY_TARGET, specifies the amount of memory available for all SGA segments, including the buffer cache. The second initialization parameter, LOG_BUFFER, determines the size of the redo log buffer in bytes. The .NET common language run time's garbage collector manages the allocation and release of memory for an application. It does this by allocating memory when your application runs and releasing it when it ends. The garbage collector is also responsible for collecting objects no longer referenced by any other object in your application. This prevents those objects from being retained and therefore prevents your application from using excessive amounts of memory. The garbage collector is a very complex process that uses various algorithms to determine when objects can be released back to the operating system. The most important thing to remember about the garbage collector is that it runs automatically when needed. You don't need to worry about manually releasing unused objects or keeping track of which objects have been removed already!