JEP 173: Remove Rarely-Used Combinations of Garbage Collectors

[Bengt Rutisson]

Hi all,

Just a heads up. I just send out a webrev on 
hotspot-gc-dev at openjdk.java.net for deprecating the DefNew + CMS and 
ParNew + SerialOld combinations. The email thread is called "Request for 
review (S): 8003820: Deprecate untested and rarely used GC combinations".

This does not touch iCMS, which seems to have been the most sensitive 
topic of the JEP. I will come back with other review on that.

Thanks,
Bengt

On 12/18/12 5:24 AM, Andrew Thompson wrote:
> Thanks for the clarification.
>
> Out of curiosity, is shrinking really a simple choice? Presumably leaving the heap larger means fewer collections and better performance overall if lots more garbage is created.
>
> Does this need some kind of goal specified on the command line beyond what's ready possible? (mx, ms, Min/MaxFreeHeapRatio seem like enough).
>
> On Dec 17, 2012, at 4:27 PM, Jon Masamitsu <jon.masamitsu at oracle.com> wrote:
>
>> Ramki,
>>
>> There is an unintended consequence :-) of having defined a compute_new_size()
>> for the CMS gen.  That compute_new_size() doesn't do shrinking and
>> gets called in the do_collection() when a full collection is done.  The result
>> is that even if the full collection results in lots of free space in the CMS
>> gen, there still isn't any shrinking.  I have a fix that hasn't been polished
>> yet.  Can't say it's coming soon but hopefully it's coming.
>>
>> Jon
>>
>> On 12/17/2012 12:05 PM, Srinivas Ramakrishna wrote:
>>> I suspect Andy (lordpixel) may be referring to CMS generally not giving old
>>> gen heao memory back to the OS even when applicatio
>>> footprint shrinks. I haven't ventured into CMS resizing code in a while,
>>> but i assumed that it would not be difficult to make it do so at
>>> the end of a sweep because of keeping a (hopefully) large contiguous free
>>> block at the high end of the heap. I don't think though that
>>> heap shrinking was ever a priority for the server environments in which CMS
>>> mostly got used, so it never really got done.
>>>
>>> -- ramki
>>>
>>> On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 10:38 AM, Jon Masamitsu<jon.masamitsu at oracle.com>wrote:
>>>
>>>> -XX:+UseParNewGC  will give you a parallel young gen collector
>>>> plus the serial old gen collector.   It does not have all the features
>>>> that -XX:+UseParallelGC has (for example, does not have support
>>>> for -XX:+UseNUMA).   It actually is one of the combinations that
>>>> we would like to remove.
>>>>
>>>> Jon
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On 12/14/2012 9:24 PM, lordpixel at me.com wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> For whatever reason I assumed this was only a collector for the young
>>>>> generation... is that wrong? Even if it does give memory back, for one of
>>>>> my apps at least its the old generation that needs to shrink.
>>>>>
>>>>> On Dec 14, 2012, at 10:52 AM, Jon Masamitsu<jon.masamitsu@**oracle.com<jon.masamitsu at oracle.com>>
>>>>>   wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>   -XX:+UseParNewGC
>>>>> AndyT (lordpixel - the cat who walks through walls)
>>>>> A little bigger on the inside
>>>>>
>>>>>          (see you later space cowboy, you can't take the sky from me)
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>