garbage collection

garbage collection (usually uncountable, plural garbage collections)

1. (Canada, US) A service, generally run by local government, for transporting household garbage to the appropriate facility.
2. (programming) An automatic mechanism that frees up resources (such as allocated memory) that are no longer in use.

   Garbage collection isn’t foolproof, but it eliminates large classes of memory errors.

• rubbish collection

• garbage collect
• garbage collector
• GC