One distinction to be clear on is the difference between a WeakReference and a SoftReference.
Basically a WeakReference will be GC-d by the JVM eagerly, once the referenced object has no hard references to it. A SoftReferenced object on the other hand, will tend to be left about by the garbage collector until it really needs to reclaim the memory.
A cache where the values are held inside WeakReferences would be pretty useless (in a WeakHashMap, it is the keys which are weakly referenced). SoftReferences are useful to wrap the values around when you want to implement a cache which can grow and shrink with the available memory
Read full article from java - When would you use a WeakHashMap or a WeakReference? - Stack Overflow
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