Typically a GC runtime will do a collection when you allocate memory, probably when the heap size is 2x the size after the last collection. But this doesn't free memory when the process doesn't allocate memory. The goal is to return unused memory back to the operating system so it's available for other purposes. (You allocate a ton of memory, calculate some result, write the result to a file, and drop references to the memory. When will it be freed?)