Building Java apps? Whether you're optimizing for speed, scalability, or low latency, every project demands a different performance balance. In this article, we dive into how Java’s diverse workloads benefit from specialized garbage collectors—focusing on the Z Garbage Collector (ZGC) and how it helps tackle performance challenges across scales.

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Java applications have diverse performance requirements, such as throughput, latency, and scalability. The Z Garbage Collector (ZGC) is designed to minimize pause times while efficiently managing large heap sizes. Unlike traditional garbage collectors that can cause significant application pauses, ZGC performs most of its work concurrently with the application, achieving minimal interruptions. This makes it ideal for high-demand environments like financial systems and large-scale cloud applications. The article includes a practical comparison between ZGC and G1 GC, showcasing ZGC's superior performance in maintaining low latency.

Z Garbage Collector in Java

Different Garbage Collectors Present in Hotspot:

ZGC Under the Hood: An Architectural Overview

Previous Mode of ZGC: Non-Generational Mode

Enough of the ZGC talk. Let’s jump in and do some action with code

<p>It would have been good to</p>
<ol>
<li>Test without taking JFR.
(Later you could have done with JFR, in case you wanted to capture any details)</li>
<li>Capture the CPU Utilization for the application, could have dumped to a file or sent to a local influxdb etc. (It would have given the cpu utilization as well). Its really important to compare GC count/time along with CPU utilization.</li>
</ol>
<p>I think the app usecase also decides the garbage collection. Like depends on if you only have large objects, or only small objects or mix, also is the JVM a cache (like hazelcast) or transactional system. Also with Kubernetes the number of parallel thread would be limited and also the amount of CPU would be limited. Would ZGC with Generations do well in this scenario.</p>
