As Java developers we often don't know much about the internals of the garbage collector, yet we occasionally struggle with it because it interferes with our application: gc "stops the world" or, more precisely, all application threads, sometimes for as much as seconds or minutes, which in many applications is a major disaster.  

The workshop provides insights into the inner workings of the garbage collection algorithms of the Oracle HotSpot JVM (aka OpenJDK), discusses guidelines for configuring and tuning them, and suggests strategies for effective gc problem analysis.  We will cover all algorithms from parallel collection on the young and old generation over the concurrent-mark-and-sweep (CMS) algorithm to Oracle's latest addition to the set of gc algorithms, namely the "garbage first" (G1) collector.

Naturally, as a workshop should do, it includes hands-on labs.  We will practice GC tuning using a simplistic, synthetic application that mimics the allocation pattern of a real-world application. Along the way, participants will learn to decipher the gc trace output, to spot gc anomalies, and to use various tools to track down gc issues.