###### garbage collection

Garbage collection is the process of removing unused objects from the heap. The IDE measures garbage collection in the following way:

- Relative time. A percentage of the total execution time that the target JVM spends running garbage collection with all application threads suspended.
- Surviving generations. The number of different ages for all objects allocated on the JVM heap since the profiling session started.
- Age of object. The age of the object is the number of garbage collections the object has survived.