As mentioned in a first post of this series, Oracle’s GarbageFirst (G1) collector has been a supported option in Java 7 for some time. This post examines in more detail the performance of the G1 garbage collector compared to the other collectors available in the Hotspot JVM. I used benchmark tests for this purpose instead of a real application because they can be executed and modified more easily. I found surprising strengths and weaknesses in several of Hotspot’s garbage collectors and even disclose a fully-fledged bug.
