Tuning Garbage Collection with the 5.0 Java[tm] Virtual Machine

Hi Friends,

I found this white paper on Garbage collection in Sun's website intersting. It discusses on options of choosing the GC.

In the J2SE platform version 1.4.2 there were four garbage collectors from which to choose but without an explicit choice by the user the serial garbage collector was always chosen. In version 5.0 the choice of the collector is based on the class of the machine on which the application is started.

This “smarter choice” of the garbage collector is generally better but is not always the best. For the user who wants to make their own choice of garbage collectors, this document will provide information on which to base that choice. This will first include the general features of the garbage collections and tuning options to take the best advantage of those features. The examples are given in the context of the serial, stop-the-world collector. Then specific features of the other collectors will be discussed along with factors that should considered when choosing one of the other collectors.

When does the choice of a garbage collector matter to the user? For many applications it doesn't. That is, the application can perform within its specifications in the presence of garbage collection with pauses of modest frequency and duration. An example where this is not the case (when the serial collector is used) would be a large application that scales well to large number of threads, processors, sockets, and a large amount of memory.





http://java.sun.com/docs/hotspot/gc5.0/gc_tuning_5.html

I hope it will help in optimizing the GC related problems