I've been dealing with some issues trying to get my JavaFX application to run over long periods without consuming all of my native resources. I posted on stackoverflow, (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15003897/is-there-any-way-to-force-javafx-to-release-video-memory) and was able to work out a semi-functional workaround, but we haven't completely resolved the issue. At the end of the day, as a developer using JavaFX, I am able to determine when I am done with a node and when it's native resources can be released without having to do any type of complex tree processing to determine node visibility states, because I am the one managing the scene. I would like to use this knowledge to be able to invoke some sort of explicit cleanup to force native resource cleanup. I think it's great that JavaFX tries to handle this under the covers, and in many cases this may work great, but I think it has been demonstrated that in extreme use cases, this is not sufficient to ensure system stability.

As I reference in the stack overflow post, I would be looking for something like the flush method on java.awt.Image, and specifically it's implementation in java.awt.image.VolatileImage.
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/awt/Image.html#flush()

This is related to the unresolved issue reported in RT-15516