Improving response times and CPU utilization

To improve overall throughput, consider implementing a generational garbage collection strategy, which is also known as a “generational concurrent garbage collection”

A generational garbage collection strategy works best with workloads that are designed to:

Reduce or eliminate garbage collection pauses
Trade some memory throughput to accomplish the reduction or elimination

Applications with these kinds of workloads often use gigabyte-sized heaps. Following are some characteristics of workloads that could benefit from generational garbage collection:

Allocates many short-lived objects
Are transaction-based, where objects in the transaction are deleted after the transaction is committed
Tend to develop a fragmented heap

Note: To verify the effectiveness of the garbage collection strategy, run the application and measure either response times or the throughput relative to garbage collection pause times, or both.

Following are the JVM switches that define a specific garbage collector algorithm. Consider setting the garbage collector algorithm to “gencon”, a generational, concurrent garbage collector. With this type of garbage collector, objects are allocated in the young generation (the nursery). When the young generation is full, JVM stops all Java™ threads and moves the live objects in the young generation to the old generation.

WebSphere® format: -Xgcpolicy:gcType, Example: -Xgcpolicy:gencon
Oracle JRockit format: -Xgc:gcType, Example: -Xgc:gencon
Java HotSpot: Generational garbage collection is the default setting.