Interpreting jstat results

Question

I am new to jstat tool. Therefore I did a sample as below.

./jstat -gcutil -t 4001 5000
Timestamp         S0     S1     E      O      P     YGC     YGCT    FGC           


        

Answer 1

See the documentation:

https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/tools/unix/jstat.html

Basically one row is one point in time. The columns show data about the JVM memory areas (Survivor, Eden, ...), understanding them is impossible without knowing how the JVM works.

For example in the article JVM garbage collection in young generation there is some explanation.

Here is the excerpt how JVM object generation works:

Eden is a place where new objects created. When the Eden is full, a small GC is run: if an object has no reference to it, it will be deleted, otherwise it will survive, and move to the Survivor space (only one of the survivor spaces in use at a time, all objects from the other space is copied there).

If an object survives a certain number of back-and-forth copying, it is moved to Old space. If the Old space is full, a Full GC is run, which affects all objects in the JVM, so it is much heavier operation.

Also, there is the Permanent space, where the "metadata" (class descriptors, field, method, ... descriptors) are stored.