What Is Serial Collector

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∟What Is Serial Collector

This section describes the Serial Collector, which uses the combination of the Serial Collector of Young generation and the Serial Collector of Tenured generation, so both minor GC and major GC are performed in a single thread serially in a stop-the-world fashion.

What Is Serial Collector? Serial Collector is actually a combination of two garbage collectors:

The Serial Collector of Young generation - It uses the 3-area (Eden, Survivor Space "From" and Survivor Space "To") algorithm serially with 1 thread only in a stop-the-world fashion.
The Serial Collector of Tenured generation - It uses the "Mark-Sweep-Compact" algorithm serially with 1 thread only in a stop-the-world fashion.

Main features of the Serial Collector:

Serial Collector runs serially with the application. That is, the Java application execution is halted while garbage collection is taking place.
Serial Collector runs with 1 thread. So it is not able take full advantage of multi-processor computer systems.
Serial Collector can be specified using the "-XX:+UseSerialGC" JVM option.
The Serial Collector was the default garbage collector for HotSpot JVM 8 and older releases.