RFR (M): 8212657: Implementation of JDK-8204089 Promptly Return Unused Committed Memory from G1 [Was: RFR (M): 8212657: Implementation of JDK-8204089 Timely Reduce Unused Committed Memory]

[Thomas Schatzl]

Hi all,

  over the weekend this JEP has been made candidate; there has been a
name change of the feature to "Promptly Return Unused Committed Memory
from G1", no other changes.

-------- Forwarded Message --------
From: Thomas Schatzl <thomas.schatzl at oracle.com>
To: hotspot-gc-dev at openjdk.java.net
Subject: RFR (M): 8212657: Implementation of JDK-8204089 Timely Reduce
Unused Committed Memory
Date: Fri, 09 Nov 2018 12:02:17 +0100

Hi all,

  please review the implementation for the JEP candidate[0] registered
under JDK-8204089: Promptly Return Unused Committed Memory from G1[1].

This change introduces a periodic gc that kicks in when the VM has been
idle for some time. This will result in G1 reducing memory footprint,
both native and Java heap memory, if possible in a "timely" fashion.

Idle detection is currently based on GC activity, and optionally based
on system load (default: disabled). Future improvements may add further
conditions as needed.

This periodic gc may be either a continuation of any current concurrent
cycle, optionally a full gc, or just disabled if you want maximum
throughput.

Continuation of current gc cycle means that every time the conditions
for such a periodic gc are met, G1 advances its current state, not
throwing away any recent effort. E.g. assume that the VM gets idle just
after marking completed; now a periodic gc will not throw away these
results, but start the mixed phase, and do mixed collections the next
few times this periodic gc is triggered, compacting the heap in the
process automatically. After that mixed phase it might do another
concurrent mark again, that releases any additional, just emptied
regions.

The optional issuance of a full GC during periodic gc may be more
efficient in returning more memory, at the cost of such a gc.

For more information, I added some example log under the "gc,periodic"
tags see the JEP [1]. In addition to that, such GCs will always have a
cause of "G1 Periodic Collection" to distinguish them from others
easily.

Since this change adds some command line flag there is a CSR too[2],
which gives a shorter summary of the options than in the JEP.

(CC'ing Kirk P. since he was kind of wary of the entire method in early
discussions, but I think the functionality turned out the way he would
like it with default settings).

The initial implementation and ideas have been contributed by Rodrigo
Bruno from University of Lisbon and Ruslan Synytsky from JElastic with
lots of additional input from the community.

CR:
https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8212657
Webrev:
http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~tschatzl/8212657/webrev/index.html
Testing:
hs-tier1-5, jdk-tier1-3

Thanks,
  Thomas

[1] https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8204089

[2] https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8212658