Most of my time developing software so far has been with the back-end, I had to learn a decent amount about specific algorithms and because of the languages I worked with especially Java, learning about the Garbage Collection is something that’s been on my mind for a while. Overall, my time spent actually researching the Garbage Collector for Java has been very limited, all I knew was the baselines of the algorithms and the base of the functionality.
While searching for some posts and information about the GC I came across a video from Inside Java that went over the Z Garbage Collector. Here is the link to said video, https://inside.java/2023/04/23/levelup-zgc/?utm_source=blog.quastor.org&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=scaling-microservices-at-doordash. For a quick summary of what is discussed in the video, there are multiple garbage collector types for Java, most of which are usually used in different scenarios. A quick description is given of these garbage collectors and some of their strengths in terms of throughput, memory footprint, latency and scalability. After discussing these, we learn more about ZGC which first released in a jdk11 development build for testing. Comparatively, ZGC is far better than pretty much every other GC in terms of scalability, heap allocation, latency and just overall performance. ZGC especially in terms of pause times is so much better that most other GC have a pause time in the terms of milliseconds, while ZGC has pause times in terms of microseconds.
With accessibility in mind, when doing performance tuning for ZGC it is way easier, after jdk 17, it auto-adjusts itself to handle the amount of threads it will need for garbage collection, aside from that there is only the max heap allocation that the user should worry about tuning as well. The reason I am mostly interested in these types of algorithms and garbage collection systems in general is because many of the projects I’ve developed rely on them to be as efficient as possible, removing the unused data and keeping memory usage down.
After watching and listening to this video I will most certainly either start using ZGC for my applications or do more research on the topic because for the most part I never paid too much attention to what GC my applications were using, it didn’t matter to me since I was uninformed on what exactly they did. Now that I know more about how specific GC’s function I’m most certainly going to start and try to apply ZGC to most of my projects as it seems it will be the most efficient for me.
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