Garbage collection is the process of automatically freeing objects that are no longer referenced by the program. This frees the programmer from having to keep track of when to free allocated memory, thereby preventing many potential bugs. Thus making programmers more productive as they can now put more effort in coding rather than worrying about memory management.
The only disadvantage of garbage collector is it adds overheads. Because the JVM (Java virtual machine) has to keep a constant track of the objects which are not referenced and then free these unreferenced objects on fly. This whole process has a slight impact on the application performance. But garbage collector has a good algorithm and it runs in its own thread thus having a least impact on the application performance but still it has some impact.