Sorry for the delay - had to step out.

The OS name is Solaris and it's a Sun box.

The reason that I'm asking is this: suppose there was a misbehaving (badly written) application that was leaving all sorts of pieces of memory laying around assuming that sooner or later the garbage collection routine would come along and clean up. If these pieces of memory happened to contain certain data, such as credit card numbers, SSAN's, etc., wouldn't that be a security exposure (between GC collections)? Another reason is this: suppose the same pieces of garbage appear over and over again with each collection. Wouldn't that be create an opportunity to 'tune' the application so that it doesn't leave all this laying around? I assume GC uses resources, and the sooner it completes it's task, the better.

It could be that in my naivete these circumstances are not significant or relevant; I just don't know.

Thank you for your time.