InfoQ: Sun's Garbage First Collector Largely Eliminates Low Latency/High Throughput Tradeoff

InfoQ: Sun's Garbage First Collector Largely Eliminates Low Latency/High Throughput Tradeoff:

"Sun's Garbage First garbage collector (hereafter referred to by its nickname G1) is the new low latency garbage collector planned to replace CMS in the Hotspot JVM. It is a server-style collector, targeted at multi-processor machines with large amounts of memory. There are two major differences between CMS and G1. The first is that G1 is a compacting collector. (...) As well as compacting, G1 offers more predictable garbage collection pauses than can be obtained with the CMS collector and allows users to set their desired pause targets."

It is part of JDK 6u14 early access, so you can try it out already now. Use the following options to enable it:

-XX:+UnlockExperimentalVMOptions -XX:+UseG1GC -Xloggc:gc.log

The last time I tested this jconsole and jvisualvm were not updated to handle this garbage collector, and the gc log format cannot directly be handled by current gc log parsers.