Java Performance: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 5. An Introduction to Garbage Collection

This chapter covers the basics of garbage collection within the JVM. Short of rewriting code, tuning the garbage collector is the most important thing that can be done to improve the performance of a Java application.

There are four main garbage collectors available in current JVMs: the serial collector (used for single-CPU machines), the throughput (parallel) collector, the concurrent (CMS) collector, and the G1 collector. Their performance characteristics are quite different, so each will be covered in depth in the next chapter. However, they share basic concepts, so this chapter provides a basic overview of how the collectors operate.

Garbage Collection Overview

One of the most attractive features of Java is that developers needn’t explicitly manage the lifecycle of objects: objects are created when needed, and when the object is no longer in use, the JVM automatically frees the object. If, like me, you spend a large amount of time optimizing the memory use of Java programs, this whole scheme might seem like a weakness instead of a feature (and the amount of time I’ll spend covering GC might seem to lend credence to that position). Certainly it can be considered a mixed blessing, though I’d say I’ve personally spent less time dealing with Java memory issues in the past 15 years than I spent during 10 years of finding and fixing bugs caused by dangling and null pointers in other languages.

At a basic level, GC consists of finding objects ...