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G1

The G1 collector can perform some expensive GC operations concurrently to the application. It's designed to scale from small to large multi-core machines with a large amount (tens of GBs, with more than 50% of the heap live) of memory. It tolerates a significant amount of heap fragmentation, and has predictable pause times not longer than a few hundred milliseconds.

The collector focuses on the young generation, with occasional space-reclamation in the old generation. Whole-heap operations are performed concurrently with the application, and short stop-the-world pauses are performed to incrementally reclaim space through evacuation and compaction of live objects to new memory areas.

The heap is broken into a set of equally-sized heap regions, the units of memory allocation and reclamation, each a contiguous range of virtual memory. Old generation regions may be "humongous" where objects span multiple regions: such objects are always allocated directly in the old generation and are never moved by the collector.

Operation is in two phases:

  • Young-only GCs gradually fill the old generation with new objects.

    • A few normal young-only collections promote objects to the old generation.
    • When the old generation occupancy reaches the Initiating Heap Occupancy threshold, a concurrent start young collection is scheduled instead of a normal young collection:
      • Concurrent start: begins marking all reachable (live) objects in the old regions to be retained. Normal young collections may occur in the meantime.
      • Remark: finalises marking, processes global references and class unloading, reclaims empty regions and cleans up internal data structures.
      • Between remark and cleanup: determines which free space may be reclaimed concurrently in old generations.
      • Cleanup: pauses to determine whether a space reclamation will follow. If so, a mixed collection is performed.

  • Space reclamation attempts to reclaim space in multiple mixed collections, evacuating live objects in the old generation regions. This phase ends when the collector determines that evacuating old generation regions wouldn't yield enough free heap space to justify the effort. A full heap stop-the-world compaction is performed if the application runs out of memory gathering liveness information.

  • Enabled with -XX:+UseG1GC.

  • The goal run-time for gaps between GC pauses is set with -XX:GCPauseTimeInterval. The collector attempts to meet this goal based on long-term observed pause time and approximations based on young generations of similar sizes.

  • The number of threads is set with -XX:ParallelGCThreads.

  • The number of threads used for concurrent work is set with -XX:ConcGCThreads, and defaults to -XX:ParallelGCThreads / 4.

  • The young generation is dynamically sized between -XX:G1NewSizePercent and -XX:G1MaxNewSizePercent (or -XX:NewSize and -XX:MaxNewSize; setting only one of these options fixes the young generation size to that value) to reduce GC pauses.

  • -XX:G1MixedGCCountTarget sets the target number of mixed GCs after a marking cycle to collect old regions with at most -XX:G1MixedGCLiveThresholdPercent live data (defaults to 8).

  • -XX:G1HeapWastePercent sets the maximum amount of heap space allowed to be wasted. Whilst below this threshold, the space reclamation phase will not execute.

  • -XX:G1PeriodicGCInterval may trigger consideration for GC at the specified minimum interval (milliseconds), allowing recovery of heap space while the application is idle.

  • -XX:+G1PeriodicGCInvokesConcurrent determines whether periodic GC should trigger concurrent (default; +) or full (-) GC.

  • -XX:G1PeriodicGCSystemLoadThreshold allows disabling periodic GC if the 1 minute system load average is above the specified threshold.

  • -XX:+G1UseAdaptiveIHOP toggles the default calculated optimal value (which is based on the spent marking and how much memory is typically allocated in the old generations during marking cycles). If disabled, -XX:InitialHeapOccupancyPercent is used as a constant instead of an initial value.

  • -XX:InitiatingHeapOccupancyPercent sets the percentage of the old generation occupancy at whichb to start the first few concurrent marking cycles (defaults to 45%).

  • -XX:G1AdaptiveIHOPNumInitialSamples sets the number of completed marking cycles which must be completed before sampling for adaptive calculation of -XX:InitialHeapOccupancyPercent (defaults to 3).

  • -XX:G1HeapReservePercent sets the buffer on the IHOP value before old generation occupancy triggers space reclamation.

  • -XX:G1HeapRegionSize sets the size of each heap region, defaults to approximately -XX:MaxHeapSize / 2 and must be a power of 2 between 1MB to 32MB.

  • -XX:+G1EagerReclaimHumongousObjects toggles attempts to reclaim humongous objects if they're not referenced by many objects during a GC pause (defaults to +).

  • -XX:-UseStringDeduplication points identical string objects at the same character array (defaults to -).

    • -XX:StringDeduplicationAgeThreshold sets the age threshold for string deduplication (defaults to 3).

  • -XX:-ExplicitGCInvokesConcurrent toggles whether explicit GCs should trigger concurrent (defaults to -).

  • -XX:-ParallelRefProcEnabled toggles parallel processing of reference objects.

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