You have no control over GC in java,the JVM decides. Since a System.gc() call simply means that the JVM do a garbage collection and it also does a FULL garbage collection (old and new generations in a multi-generational heap) then it can actually cause more cpu cycles to be consumed than necessary.
In some cases, it may make sense to suggest to the JVM that it do a full collection now as you may know the application 'll be sitting idle for the next few minutes before heavy lifting occurs. For example, right after the initialization of a lot of temporary object during application startup . Think of an IDE such as eclipse starting up it does a lot to initialize, so perhaps immediately after initialization it makes sense to do a full gc at that point.
