An analysis of the garbage collection performance in Sun's HotSpot/sup TM/ Java Virtual Machine

Sun Microsystems introduced the Java HotSpot Virtual Machine as a high performance engine for the Java programming language. The improvements over the classic Java Virtual Machine include dynamic compilation and optimization, better thread synchronization, and a more sophisticated and fully accurate garbage collection system. In this paper, a thorough analysis of the dynamic memory management issues in the HotSpot VM are performed. The analysis includes the memory allocation latency, the workload distribution, overall garbage collection time, and the pause times. The results indicate that the HotSpot VM succeeds in reducing the pause times by approximately 80%. However, it may prolong the overall garbage collection time in some applications.