HotSpot Default Garbage Collector

JVM Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples - Version 4.23, by Dr. Herong Yang

JVM Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples

∟Memory Management and Garbage Collectors

∟HotSpot Default Garbage Collector - Serial Collector

This section describes basic steps of a Tenured Generation Collection, also called a Full Collection, which uses a simple 3-step Mark-Sweep-Compact algorithm on the entire Tenured Generation.

In previous two sections, we learned the 3-area (Eden, Survivor Space "From" and Survivor Space "To") algorithm used in Minor Collection and the 3-step (Mark, Sweep and Compact) algorithm used in the Full collection. When using them together with the 2-generation (Young Generation and Tenured Generation) architecture used in the Heap, we have our first complete garbage collector model, which is referred as the Serial Collector.

What Is Serial Collector? Serial Collector is the default garbage collector used in HotSpot Client version since 1.5. I gathered the following information about Serial Collector from Oracle documentations:

Serial Collector does Minor Collection and Full Collection serially in a stop-the-world fashion. That is, the Java application execution is halted while collection is taking place.
Serial Collector uses the 3-area (Eden, Survivor Space "From" and Survivor Space "To") algorithm for Minor Collections in the Young Generation.
Serial Collector uses the 3-step (Mark, Sweep and Compact) algorithm for Full Collections in the Tenured Generation.
Serial Collector is the default garbage collector in HotSpot Client 1.5 and higher.
Serial Collector can be specified using the "-XX:+UseSerialGC" command line option.

Last update: 2014.

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About This Book

Downloading and Installing JDK 1.8.0 on Windows

Downloading and Installing JDK 1.7.0 on Windows

java.lang.Runtime Class - The JVM Instance

java.lang.System Class - The Operating System

ClassLoader Class - Class Loaders

Class Class - Class Reflections

Sun's JVM - Java HotSpot VM

JRockit JVM 28.2.7 by Oracle Corporation

JVM Runtime Data Areas