Entity Beans not getting garbage collected

Question

Hi,
I am developing an application that is using EJBs utilizing several common design patterns (i.e. Session Facade, DAO, and Fast Lane Reader). All of the patterns used have come from books by Sun Microsystems Press.
As I have understood the pattern, the Session Facade pattern uses Stateless Session Beans (SLSB) to implement a desired functionality and accesses the entity beans locally. The results from the entity beans are placed into Value Objects and passed back to the client separating any direct access with the entity beans from the client. In my case, I am using BMP for my entity beans.
The problem I am seeing with Optimizeit is that none of my entity beans are getting garbage collected despite no references to them. The SLSB creates what entities it needs to perform a task at the local level, puts the data into a value object and goes out of scope.
Shouldn't the entity beans get removed if the object that references them has gone away or am I missing something?
Is there a proper way to set an entity bean (or any EJB for that matter) for garbage collection.
thanks in advance for any help...

Answer 1

You might even discover that entity beans can get created even before you use them.
Your application server creates "pools" of bean instances that it can use when it needs to. It is part of this role, and is done in order to optimize performances.
You cannot force them to be garbage collected. Even if you stop referencing them, the app server will.
When your create references to a bean, it (usually) won't create an instance. It will take an existing one, and load data into it, using ejbCreate or ejbActivate.
Hope this helps.
/Stephane