Garbage collection: The pause time goal


By default the JVM starts a Stop-The-World garbage collection cycle when certain memory thresholds are met. The execution time is monitored and if it is longer than 200 ms limits are adjusted. Today such long pause times are rarely seen for apps like I2P. The machine we derived the published load figures from shows an average GC pause time of 72 ms. X86 usually needs some ms only.

You can determine your average pause time from doing some simple math from the JConsole summary page. I2P does a very good job coping with long pause times and throws only a few warnings related to delays caused by GC. You will need to increase your log level to see that. However there are timers within I2P possibly striking after 10ms and I2Speed goes down as low as 1 ms. So you can be pretty sure of delays caused by STW GC and afterwards the CPU will have to go full throttle for some time to catch up.

If you think your GC pause times are too long (maybe because you allocated too much memory), you can explicitly set a pause time goal. In the example above , setting a pause time goal of 20 ms resulted in STW GC occurring 7 times as frequent using twice as much CPU. The JVM then sticks very close to the goal you set.

You set the pause time goal using:
<-- Back