Best Practices to Use Garbage Collection

Collector choice is a primary concern as the wrong collector can hinder performance and render the application useless. For backend purposes, the CMS collector can prove to be useful in spite of having the disadvantage of stopping the application itself during garbage collection. However, the frontend of the application must not implement CMS because the UI must always be responsive. This calls for G1 collectors which can run concurrently with the application in itself. ZGC is the newest and provides very low latency and high throughput which can be used by applications that require low latency and uses large-size Heap. Whenever you are using garbage collections in Java it is important to note that you can never predict when the garbage collector will run. You can try to explicitly call the garbage collector by System.gc() and Runtime.gc(). However, even after explicitly calling the Garbage collector there is no guarantee that it will actually work.

JDKs come with different JVM implementations (Oracle HotSpot, Eclipse OpenJ9, GraalVM, Jikes RVM, Codename One), and different garbage collector implementations with different tuning options (Serial, Parallel, CMS, G1, Z, Shenandoah). In this article, we will know more about the Garbage Collector, how it works, and the various types of GC available in Java. We will also cover some of the new experimental Garbage Collectors that are available in the latest Java releases.