Pro C# 2010 and the .NET 4 Platform, Fifth Edition

8.5. Concurrent Garbage Collection under .NET 1.0 – 3.5

Prior to .NET 4.0, the runtime would clean up unused objects using a technique termed concurrent garbage collection. Under this model, when a collection takes place for any generation 0 or generation 1 objects (recall these are ephemeral generations), the garbage collector temporarily suspends all active threads within the current process to ensure that the application does not access the managed heap during the collection process.

We will examine the topic of threads in Chapter 19; however, for the time being, simply regard a thread as a path of execution within a running executable. Once the garbage collection cycle has completed, the suspended threads are permitted to carry on their ...