Has anyone found Garbage Collection tuning to be useful?

Question

I\'ve read plenty of articles about tuning GC in Java and have often wondered how many people really use some of the more advanced features.

I\'ve always av

Answer 1

I have but not recently. The application that I was working on was real-time rendering of a video stream constructed of individual motion JPEG images. At the time (circa JDK 1.2 and 1.3), the -Xincgc setting would switch the client garbage collector from more of a big bang cleanup to a mode where a bit of garbage was cleaned up regularly. As a result, the distribution of frame latencies was much lower, giving the impression of a smoother video (instead of 1-2-3-pause, 1-2-3-pause).

I haven't looked at that code in quite a long time but I strongly suspect that, with the modern garbage collection algorithms, -Xincgc would actually decrease performance.

In today's world, I would say that standard optimization skepticism should always apply: profile profile profile. Are you sure that the bottleneck is really the garbage collector...?