Monday, July 10, 2006

Greg Luck was suffering a nine second GC pause every fifty seconds, when Sun suggested some garbage collection tunings that solved the problem (down to two major GCs every day, he says, in "How We Solved our Garbage Collection Pausing Problem.") The tunings were pretty simple:
-XX:+DisableExplicitGC -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:NewSize=1200m -XX:SurvivorRatio=16As Greg says:
-XX:+DisableExplicitGC - some libs call System.gc(). This is usually a bad idea and could explain some of what we saw.-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC - use the low pause collector-XX:NewSize=1200m -XX:SurvivorRatio=16 - the black magic part. Tuning these requires emprical observation of your GC log, either from verbose gc or jstat (a JDK 1.5 tool). In particular the 1200m new size is 1/4 of our heap size of 4800MB.

This interesting article appeared on the TheServerSide at
http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=41258