WebSphere Peformance - Alexandre Polozoff's Point of View

With WebSphere Application Server v8 the IBM JRE provides a new garbage collection policy known as balanced.  One should consider trying the balanced policy if running on the 64-bit JVM using a Java heap size over 4GB and still experiencing occasional long pauses with the gencon policy.  It does impose a slight performance hit but based on how some applications are written or coded it may be necessary for the runtime operations team to try this policy in an attempt to avoid large pause times.  The balanced policy can also take advantage of non-uniform memory access (NUMA) hardware architecture available on System x® and System p® using current versions of AIX®, Linux® or Windows®.