Understanding Java Garbage Collection

©2014 Azul Systems, Inc. presented at NYJavaSIG, March 2014
Understanding Java
Garbage Collection
and what you can do about it
Matt Schuetze, Director of Product Management
Azul Systems
A presentation to the New York Java Special Interest Group
March 27, 2014

This Talk’s Purpose / Goals
This talk is focused on GC education
This is not a “how to use flags to tune a collector” talk
This is a talk about how the “GC machine” works
Purpose: Once you understand how it works, you can
use your own brain...
You’ll learn just enough to be dangerous...
The “Azul makes the world’s greatest GC” stuff will only
come at the end, I promise...

About Azul Systems
We deal with Java performance issues on a daily
basis
Our solutions focus on consistent response time under load
We enable practical, full use of hardware resources
As a result, we often help characterize problems
In many/most cases, it’s not the database, app, or
network - it’s the JVM, or the system under it…
GC Pauses, OS or Virtualization “hiccups”, swapping, etc.
We use and provide simple tools to help discover
what’s going on in a JVM and the underlying
platform
Focus on measuring JVM/Platform behavior with your app
Non-intrusive, no code changes, easy to add

About Azul
We make scalable Virtual
Machines
Have built “whatever it takes
to get job done” since 2002
3 generations of custom SMP
Multi-core HW (Vega)
Now Pure software for
commodity x86 (Zing)
“Industry firsts” in Garbage
collection, elastic memory,
Java virtualization, memory
scale
Vega
C4

High level agenda
GC fundamentals and key mechanisms
Some GC terminology & metrics
Classifying current commercially available collectors
Why Stop-The-World is a problem
The C4 collector: What a solution to STW looks like...

Is GC still a real problem?
“The one big challenge left
for Java on performance is
containing pause times.
Latency jitter is the only
reason to ever use
other languages inside
Twitter.”
--Adam Messinger,
CTO of Twitter
Citation: Oracle Java 8
global launch video,
March 25, 2014

GC behavior of a JVM with little heap tuning
-Xms1024m -Xmx1024m -XX:NewSize=200m -XX:MaxNewSize=200m
New generation GC
pauses on average
occurred every 6
seconds and lasted
less than 50
milliseconds.
Any single pause is
unnoticeable to the
users waiting for the
server’s response.
Old generation pauses
on average occurred
less than once per
hour but lasted as much
as almost 8 seconds on
average with a single
outlier even reaching 19
seconds.
Many Old Generation Full GC (the grey
lines) Blue = Heap occupancy
Heap used over a period of about 25 hours:

Memory use
• How many of you use heap sizes of:
• more than ½ GB?
• more than 1 GB?

Why should you understand
(at least a little) how GC works?

Much of what People seem to “know”
about Garbage Collection is wrong
In many cases, it’s much better than you may think
GC is extremely efficient. Much more so that malloc()
Dead objects cost nothing to collect
GC will find all the dead objects (including cyclic graphs)
...
In many cases, it’s much worse than you may think
Yes, it really does stop for ~1 sec per live GB
No, GC does not mean you can’t have memory leaks
No, those pauses you eliminated from your 20 minute test are not
gone
...

Trying to solve GC problems in application
architecture is like throwing knives
You probably shouldn’t do it blindfolded
It takes practice to do it well without hurting people
You can get very good at it, but do you really want to?
Will all the code you leverage be as good as yours?
Examples of “GC friendly” techniques:
Object pooling
Off heap storage
Distributed heaps
...
(In most cases, you end up building your own garbage collector)

Some GC Terminology

A Concurrent Collector performs garbage collection work
concurrently with the application’s own execution
A Parallel Collector uses multiple CPUs to perform
garbage collection
Classifying a collector’s operation
An Incremental collector performs a garbage collection
operation or phase as a series of smaller discrete
operations with (potentially long) gaps in between
A Stop-the-World collector performs garbage collection
while the application is completely stopped
Mostly means sometimes it isn’t (usually means a
different fall back mechanism exists)

Compact
Over time, heap will get “swiss cheesed”: contiguous
dead space between objects may not be large enough
to fit new objects (aka “fragmentation”)
Compaction moves live objects together to reclaim
contiguous empty space (aka “relocate”)
Compaction has to correct all object references to
point to new object locations (aka “remap”)
Remap scan must cover all references that could
possibly point to relocated objects
Note: work is generally linear to “live set”

Copy
A copying collector moves all lives objects from a
“from” space to a “to” space & reclaims “from” space
At start of copy, all objects are in “from” space and all
references point to “from” space.
Start from “root” references, copy any reachable
object to “to” space, correcting references as we go
At end of copy, all objects are in “to” space, and all
references point to “to” space
Note: work generally linear to “live set”

Generational Collection
Weak Generational Hypothesis; “most objects die young”
Focus collection efforts on young generation:
Use a moving collector: work is linear to the live set
The live set in the young generation is a small % of the space
Promote objects that live long enough to older generations
Only collect older generations as they fill up
“Generational filter” reduces rate of allocation into older generations
Tends to be (order of magnitude) more efficient
Great way to keep up with high allocation rate
Practical necessity for keeping up with processor throughput

Why Generational Garbage Collection
Here is an example of such data. Y axis = number of bytes
allocated; X access = number of bytes allocated over time
Having to mark and compact all
the objects in a JVM is
inefficient. As more and more
objects are allocated, the list of
objects grows and grows
leading to longer and longer
garbage collection time.
However, empirical analysis of
applications has shown that
most objects are short lived.
This is called the ‘weak
generational hypothesis’
As you can see, fewer and
fewer objects remain allocated
over time. In fact most objects
have a very short life as shown
by the higher values on the left
side of the graph
Bytes allocated over time
X = number of Bytes allocated; Y = number of Bytes allocated over time

Mutator
Your program…
Parallel
Can use multiple CPUs
Concurrent
Runs concurrently with program
Pause
A time duration in which the
mutator is not running any code
Stop-The-World (STW)
Something that is done in a pause
Monolithic Stop-The-World
Something that must be done in it’s
entirety in a single pause
Useful terms for discussing garbage
collection
Generational
Collects young objects and long lived
objects separately.
Promotion
Allocation into old generation
Marking
Finding all live objects
Sweeping
Locating the dead objects
Compaction
Defragments heapMoves objects in
memory. Remaps all affected references.
Frees contiguous memory regions

Useful metrics for discussing garbage
collection
Cycle time
How long it takes the collector to free
up memory
Marking time
How long it takes the collector to find all
live objects
Sweep time
How long it takes to locate dead
objects
* Relevant for Mark-Sweep
Compaction time
How long it takes to free up memory by
relocating objects
* Relevant for Mark-Compact
Heap population (aka Live set)
How much of your heap is alive
Allocation rate
How fast you allocate
Mutation rate
How fast your program updates
references in memory
Heap Shape
The shape of the live object graph
* Hard to quantify as a metric...
Object Lifetime
How long objects live

Classifying common collectors

The typical combos
in commercial server JVMS
Young generation usually uses a copying collector
Young generation is usually monolithic, stop-the-world
Old generation usually uses Mark/Sweep/Compact
Old generation may be STW, or Concurrent, or mostly-
Concurrent, or Incremental-STW, or mostly-
Incremental-STW

HotSpot™ ParallelGC
Collector mechanism classification
Monolithic Stop-the-world copying NewGen
Monolithic Stop-the-world Mark/Sweep/Compact OldGen

HotSpot™ ConcMarkSweepGC (aka CMS)
Monolithic Stop-the-world copying NewGen (ParNew)
Mostly Concurrent, non-compacting OldGen (CMS)
Mostly Concurrent marking
Mark concurrently while mutator is running
Track mutations in card marks
Revisit mutated cards (repeat as needed)
Stop-the-world to catch up on mutations, ref processing, etc.
Concurrent Sweeping
Does not Compact (maintains free list, does not move objects)
Fallback to Full Collection (Monolithic Stop the world).
Used for Compaction, etc.

HotSpot™ G1GC (aka “Garbage First”)
Monolithic Stop-the-world copying NewGen
Mostly Concurrent, OldGen marker
Mostly Concurrent marking
Stop-the-world to catch up on mutations, ref processing, etc.
Tracks inter-region relationships in remembered sets
Stop-the-world mostly incremental compacting old gen
Objective: “Avoid, as much as possible, having a Full GC…”
Compact sets of regions that can be scanned in limited time
Delay compaction of popular objects, popular regions
Fallback to Full Collection (Monolithic Stop the world).
Used for compacting popular objects, popular regions, etc.

Delaying the inevitable
Some form of copying/compaction is inevitable in practice
And compacting anything requires scanning/fixing all references to it
Delay tactics focus on getting “easy empty space” first
This is the focus for the vast majority of GC tuning
Most objects die young [Generational]
So collect young objects only, as much as possible. Hope for short STW.
But eventually, some old dead objects must be reclaimed
Most old dead space can be reclaimed without moving it
[e.g. CMS] track dead space in lists, and reuse it in place
But eventually, space gets fragmented, and needs to be moved
Much of the heap is not “popular” [e.g. G1, “Balanced”]
A non popular region will only be pointed to from a small % of the heap
So compact non-popular regions in short stop-the-world pauses
But eventually, popular objects and regions need to be compacted
Young generation pauses are only small because heaps are tiny
A 200GB heap will regularly have several GB of live young stuff…

Monolithic-STW GC Problems

One way to deal with Monolithic-STW GC

Another way to cope: “Creative Language”
“Guarantee a worst case of X msec, 99% of the time”
“Mostly” Concurrent, “Mostly” Incremental
• Translation: “Will at times exhibit long monolithic stop-
the-world pauses”
“Fairly Consistent”
• Translation: “Will sometimes show results well outside
this range”
“Typical pauses in the tens of milliseconds”
• Translation: “Some pauses are much longer than tens
of milliseconds”

Actually measuring things
(e.g. jHiccup)

Getting past a monolithic-STW
Garbage Collection world

We need to solve the right problems
Scale is artificially limited by responsiveness
Responsiveness must be unlinked from scale:
Heap size, Live Set size, Allocation rate, Mutation rate
Transaction Rate, Concurrent users, Data set size, etc.
Responsiveness must be continually sustainable
Can’t ignore “rare” events
Eliminate all Stop-The-World Fallbacks
At modern server scales, any STW fall back is a failure

The problems that need solving
(areas where the state of the art needs improvement)
Robust Concurrent Marking
In the presence of high mutation and allocation rates
Cover modern runtime semantics (e.g. weak refs, lock deflation)
Compaction that is not monolithic-stop-the-world
E.g. stay responsive while compacting ¼ TB heaps
Must be robust: not just a tactic to delay STW compaction
[current “incremental STW” attempts fall short on robustness]
Young-Gen that is not monolithic-stop-the-world
Stay responsive while promoting multi-GB data spikes
Concurrent or “incremental STW” may both be ok
Surprisingly little work done in this specific area

Azul’s “C4” Collector
Continuously Concurrent Compacting Collector
Concurrent guaranteed-single-pass marker
Oblivious to mutation rate
Concurrent ref (weak, soft, final) processing
Concurrent Compactor
Objects moved without stopping mutator
References remapped without stopping mutator
Can relocate entire generation (New, Old) in every GC cycle
Concurrent, compacting old generation
Concurrent, compacting new generation
No stop-the-world fallback
Always compacts, and always does so concurrently

C4 algorithm highlights
Same core mechanism used for both generations
Concurrent Mark-Compact
A Loaded Value Barrier (LVB) is central to the algorithm
Every heap reference is verified as “sane” when loaded
“Non-sane” refs are caught and fixed in a self-healing barrier
Refs that have not yet been “marked through” are caught
Guaranteed single pass concurrent marker
Refs that point to relocated objects are caught
Lazily (and concurrently) remap refs, no hurry
Relocation and remapping are both concurrent
Uses “quick release” to recycle memory
Forwarding information is kept outside of object pages
Physical memory released immediately upon relocation
“Hand-over-hand” compaction without requiring empty memory

GC Tuning

Java GC tuning is “hard”…
Examples of actual command line GC tuning parameters:
Java -Xmx12g -XX:MaxPermSize=64M -XX:PermSize=32M -XX:MaxNewSize=2g
-XX:NewSize=1g -XX:SurvivorRatio=128 -XX:+UseParNewGC
-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:MaxTenuringThreshold=0
-XX:CMSInitiatingOccupancyFraction=60 -XX:+CMSParallelRemarkEnabled
-XX:+UseCMSInitiatingOccupancyOnly -XX:ParallelGCThreads=12
-XX:LargePageSizeInBytes=256m …
Java –Xms8g –Xmx8g –Xmn2g -XX:PermSize=64M -XX:MaxPermSize=256M
-XX:-OmitStackTraceInFastThrow -XX:SurvivorRatio=2 -XX:-UseAdaptiveSizePolicy
-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:+CMSConcurrentMTEnabled
-XX:+CMSParallelRemarkEnabled -XX:+CMSParallelSurvivorRemarkEnabled
-XX:CMSMaxAbortablePrecleanTime=10000 -XX:+UseCMSInitiatingOccupancyOnly
-XX:CMSInitiatingOccupancyFraction=63 -XX:+UseParNewGC –Xnoclassgc …

The complete guide to
Zing GC tuning
• java -Xmx40g

Sustainable Throughput:
The throughput achieved while
safely maintaining service levels
Unsustainable
Throughout

Instance capacity test: “Fat Portal”
HotSpot CMS: Peaks at ~ 3GB / 45 concurrent users
* LifeRay portal on JBoss @ 99.9% SLA of 5 second response times

Instance capacity test: “Fat Portal”
C4: still smooth @ 800 concurrent users

Fun with jHiccup

How is Azul’s Java Platform Different?
Same JVM standard -
Licensed JCK compliant JVM for JSE6 and JSE7. JSE 8 in flight.*
Derived from same base as Hotspot, fully Java compatible
passes Java Compatibility Kit (JCK) server-level compatibility (~53000 tests )
A different approach
Garbage is good!
Designed with insight that worst case must eventually happen
Unique values
Highly scalable … 100s GB with consistent low pause times – other JVMs will have longer
“stop-the-world” pauses in proportion to size of JVM and memory allocation rate
Elastic memory … insurance for JVMs to handle dynamic load – unlike other JVMs which
are rigidly tuned
Collects New Garbage and Old Garbage concurrently with running application threads …
there is no “stop-the-world” for GC purposes (you will only see extremely short pause times to
reach safepoints) – unlike other JVMs which will eventually stop-the-world.
Compacts Memory concurrently with your application threads running … Zing will move
objects without “stop-the-world” or single-threading – which is a major issue with other JVMs
Measuring pause times from FIRST thread stopped (unlike other JVMs)
Rich non-intrusive production visibility with ZVision and ZVRobot
WYTIWYG (What You Test Is What You Get)
* Zing for JSE8 in dev
with JCK 8 in QA as of
today’s talk

"We were originally designed for extremely large heaps, and
some people use us in huge-data-set situations – which is
why a typical 5GB or 10GB heap that challenges most JVMs
is a walk in the park for Zing"

Some people have big problems to solve
in the big data world and Zing doesn’t
pause for GC
Tests were performed with varying live data set sizes,
and a 250GB heap:
55 GB:
• Zing: 35 milliseconds; Hotspot G1: 357 seconds
110 GB:
• Zing: 75 milliseconds; Hotspot G1: 225 seconds
215 GB:
• Zing: 20 milliseconds; Hotspot G1: 1,055 seconds
JavaOne 2012: Neil Ferguson, Causata:
CON4623 - Big RAM: How Java Developers Can Fully Exploit Massive Amounts of RAM

What you can expect (from Zing)
in the low latency world
Assuming individual transaction work is “short” (on
the order of 1 msec), and assuming you don’t have
100s of runnable threads competing for 10 cores...
“Easily” get your application to < 10 msec worst case
With some tuning, 2-3 msec worst case
Can go to below 1 msec worst case...
May require heavy tuning/tweaking
Mileage WILL vary

Oracle HotSpot (pure newgen) Zing
Low latency trading application

Low latency - Drawn to scale
Oracle HotSpot (pure newgen) Zing

Q & A
GC :
G. Tene, B. Iyengar and M. Wolf
C4: The Continuously Concurrent Compacting Collector
In Proceedings of the international symposium on Memory management,
ISMM’11, ACM, pages 79-88
Jones, Richard; Hosking, Antony; Moss, Eliot (25 July 2011).
The Garbage Collection Handbook: The Art of Automatic Memory
Management. CRC Press. ISBN 1420082795.
jHiccup:
http://www.azulsystems.com/dev_resources/jhiccup

Thanks for Attending
www.azulsystems.com
Grab a pen!
Take a card!
To contact the speaker email:
Matt Schuetze, Director of Product Management
mschuetze@azulsystems.com
Refer to NYJavaSIG

Understanding Java Garbage Collection

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