GC methods and policies

As we learned in the preceding section, there isn't one but four different garbage collectors. Each one has its own advantages and disadvantages. The one thing these collectors have in common is that they split the managed heap into different segments with the assumption that objects are short-lived and should be removed shortly. Let's see four different algorithms of GC.

Serial collector

The Serial collector is the simplest GC implementation, mainly designed for single-threaded environments and small heaps. This GC implementation freezes all application threads whenever it's working. Hence, it's not a good idea to use it in multithreaded applications, such as server environments.

To enable the Serial garbage collector, set -XX:+UseSerialGC to VM arguments

Parallel/Throughput collector

The Parallel collector is the JVM's default collector and is also known as the Throughput collector. As the name suggests, this collector, unlike the Serial collector, uses multithread to...