JavaZone 2007: Getting the most out of GC

"GC is automatic memory management; if it was really automatic, we should all really be at the pub instead of sitting here, innit?"

(My crap rendition of Holly's actually funny joke)

Holly Cummins from IBM at Hursley, UK (where they do CICS, MQ and some JVM things, I guess) gave some general info on GC and demoed EVTK (for which she is lead). I think this is the first time I've seen an IBM-er with blue hair :-)

Holly noted that GC can actually be faster for an app than manually using malloc/free. She quoted some numbers where C apps can spend up to 20% of their time in free. GC can also exploit cache locality better by rearranging objects, compaction, etc. Unfortunately, GC can also stuff the cache full of crap when it traverses the heap.

Mean pause time is not a good indicator of performance. Small heaps mean smaller pauses, but can also mean worse performance. Smaller pauses doesn't necessarily mean better response time; if the app has a heavy workload the response time will be dominated by waiting for the CPU. "Real time is not real fast."

What can verbose GC tell you? New IBM diagnostic tools for the IBM JVM: available as plugins to the IBM Support Assistant. Extensible Verbose Toolkit: verbose GC analysis. Actually handles verbose output from Sun JVM also! Creates reports, graphs, etc. Install the Support Assistant and find EVTK as a plugin.

Holly did a nice demo of EVTK showing how too small a heap can make an app spend too much of it's time running GC, throttling app throughput. And a second demo showing how to look for a memory leak. EVTK can show how many weak references are cleared, etc.

Nice overview of the different GC policies, etc. at the end, I'm too busy following it to make notes :-)