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Admin
Putting a button in the UI that does something but not actually anything hurtful or counter-productive is actually a nice psychological trick - you know, like progress bars. They all lie to users but they still help somehow (https://austinhenley.com/blog/fixprogressbars.html).
Edit Admin
Pretty much this, specifically because it gives the user an illusion of control, that feeling that "Hey, it seems to be messing up somehow, I'll push the 'stop messing up' button"... (Even though the button does nothing at all, or nothing that makes any difference, e.g. calling
System.gc();.)But the thing about progress bars is that they are very often set up to track the wrong parameter. Time-remaining for downloads or uploads is notoriously flaky, because it's measuring/calculating something that is subject to variations that cannot be controlled by the downloader. Instead, we should track amount-transferred as a fraction of total-amount-to-transfer, both of which should be known. (A downloader that doesn't track the amount it has already downloaded correctly is a severe WTF, and it has been possible to know how big the object being downloaded is before it finishes for more than 25 years, so no excuses.)
Edit Admin
I am more surprised that initiating garbage collection in Java is not guaranteed. Sounds to me more like a bug than a feature lol