Min vs Max vs Soft Memory Limits

[Mike Rettig]

On Wed, May 19, 2021 at 2:53 AM Per Liden <per.liden at oracle.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On 5/13/21 3:24 AM, Mike Rettig wrote:
> > Ideally ZGC would provide a set of options so that it knows the
> > priorities of the application. With G1, this is easy. You specify the
> > min and max memory and a max pause time target. G1 will adjust
> > accordingly to meet those goals. ZGC needs something similar to G1's max
> > pause time. Since the pause time is consistently below 1ms, the pause
> > time target doesn't make sense. Maybe ZGC needs a pause frequency target?
>
> That's essentially what you have today in ZGC, with Xmx and
> SoftMaxHeapSize. These options control the heap size, which directly
> correlates with GC frequency.
>

Finding the right SoftMaxHeapSize is tedious. It's going to be different
based on the hardware and load. Also the number will change as features are
added to the application. It would be much easier if ZGC could be
configured based on the acceptable limits (min memory, max memory, pause
target). Does ZGC use the min memory for anything? IME ZGC immediately uses
all the memory up to max.


> My goal with ZGC is to pause as infrequently as possible. I think that
> > is a common goal for developers. ZGC benchmarks often compare the avg
> > and max pause times compared to G1 but in some cases the overall pause
> > time for ZGC is greater than G1 because it pauses more frequently.
>
> Are you sure you're looking at the right numbers here? If you're on JDK
> 16, then pauses are normally ~50us, so that means ZGC would run GC
> cycles something like 1000 times more often then G1, which doesn't sound
> right. Did you perhaps get the accumulated GC time from the
> GarbageCollectorMXBean? If so, that doesn't show you the accumulated GC
> pasuse times, but the accumulated time for complete GC cycles. Btw, this
> was changed in JDK 17 (see https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/pull/3483).
>
> I am using jdk 16 and I get my numbers from the safepoints in the GC log.
Pauses average 100-200us for each stage (ZMarketStart, ZMarkEnd,
ZRelocateStart). If an average collection takes ~500us for all 3 stages,
then it can quickly approach the collection time for G1 if the typical G1
pause is 3ms.


> > Recently I've disabled the proactive pauses. Why bother to do a
> > collection when the heap is 30% full when it can done in the same amount
> > of time when the heap is at 80%?
>
> If you get proactive GC cycles, it means you application is more or less
> idle, or at least it's not allocating very much. Proactive GC cycles
> happen for two main reasons:
> 1) Avoid expanding the heap, since an (almost) idle application doesn't
> need that memory.
> 2) Even if the application is idle for periods of time, you still want
> Finalizers to run.
>

What are the thresholds for an app being idle? IME ZGC appears to be very
aggregresive for proactive pauses. I know the app isn't completely idle.  I
think there is an assumption that ZGC collections are essentially free so
you might as well do them frequently. I still consider them very costly.
Stopping user threads should only be done when absolutely necessary.

Does G1 do proactive pauses?  G1 pause times increase with the size of the
heap so proactive pauses could help G1 stay within the pause target.

Mike