1. HotSpot Virtual Machine Garbage Collection Tuning Guide
  2. The Mostly Concurrent Collectors

7 The Mostly Concurrent Collectors

The mostly concurrent collectors perform parts of their work concurrently to the application, hence their name. The Java HotSpot VM includes two mostly concurrent collectors:

  • Concurrent Mark Sweep (CMS) collector: This collector is for applications that prefer shorter garbage collection pauses and can afford to share processor resources with the garbage collection.

  • Garbage-First (G1) garbage collector: This server-style collector is for multiprocessor machines with a large amount of memory. It meets garbage collection pause-time goals with high probability while achieving high throughput.

Overhead of Mostly Concurrent Collectors

The mostly concurrent collector trades processor resources (which would otherwise be available to the application) for shorter major collection pause time.

The most visible overhead is the use of one or more processors during the concurrent parts of the collection. On an N processor system, the concurrent part of the collection uses K/N of the available processors, where 1 <= K <= ceiling{N/4}. In addition to the use of processors during concurrent phases, additional overhead is incurred to enable concurrency. Thus, while garbage collection pauses are typically much shorter with the concurrent collector, application throughput also tends to be slightly lower than with the other collectors.

On a machine with more than one processing core, processors are available for application threads during the concurrent part of the collection, so the concurrent garbage collector thread doesn't pause the application. This usually results in shorter pauses, but again fewer processor resources are available to the application and some slowdown should be expected, especially if the application uses all of the processing cores maximally. As N increases, the reduction in processor resources due to concurrent garbage collection becomes smaller, and the benefit from concurrent collection increases. See Concurrent Mode Failure, which discusses potential limits to such scaling.

Because at least one processor is used for garbage collection during the concurrent phases, the concurrent collectors don't normally provide any benefit on a uniprocessor (single-core) machine.