G1 GC in JDK 9

What is garbage collection?

 Garbage collection is a way to manage memory.

 In Java, programmers don't have to manage memory explicitly.
 String s = new String("Hello GC");

Compared to C where you have to manage memory:
char* s = malloc(sizeof(char) * 10); free(s);

Garbage Collection Cycle 

 On a high level, the G1 collector alternates between two phases. The young-only phase contains garbage collections that fill up the currently available memory with objects in the old generation gradually. The space-reclamation phase is where G1 reclaims space in the old generation incrementally, in addition to handling the young generation. Then the cycle restarts with a young-only phase.

1. Young-only phase: This phase starts with a few young-only collections that promote objects into the old generation. The transition between the young-only phase and the space-reclamation phase starts when the old generation occupancy reaches a certain threshold, the Initiating Heap Occupancy threshold. At this time, G1 schedules an Initial Mark young-only collection instead of a regular young-only collection.
   • Initial Mark : This type of collection starts the marking process in addition to performing a regular young-only collection. Concurrent marking determines all currently reachable (live) objects in the old generation regions to be kept for the following space-reclamation phase. While marking hasn’t completely finished, regular young collections may occur. Marking finishes with two special stop-the-world pauses: Remark and Cleanup.
   • Remark: This pause finalizes the marking itself, and performs global reference processing and class unloading. Between Remark and Cleanup G1 calculates a summary of the liveness information concurrently, which will be finalized and used in the Cleanup pause to update internal data structures.
   • Cleanup: This pause also reclaims completely empty regions, and determines whether a space-reclamation phase will actually follow. If a space-reclamation phase follows, the young-only phase completes with a single young-only collection.
2. Space-reclamation phase: This phase consists of multiple mixed collections that in addition to young generation regions, also evacuate live objects of sets of old generation regions. The space-reclamation phase ends when G1 determines that evacuating more old generation regions wouldn't yield enough free space worth the effort.

Determining Initiating Heap Occupancy

The Initiating Heap Occupancy Percent (IHOP) is the threshold at which an Initial Mark collection is triggered and it is defined as a percentage of the old generation size.

G1 by default automatically determines an optimal IHOP by observing how long marking takes and how much memory is typically allocated in the old generation during marking cycles. This feature is called Adaptive IHOP. If this feature is active, then the option -XX:InitiatingHeapOccupancyPercentdetermines the initial value as a percentage of the size of the current old generation as long as there aren't enough observations to make a good prediction of the Initiating Heap Occupancy threshold. Turn off this behavior of G1 using the option-XX:-G1UseAdaptiveIHOP. In this case, the value of -XX:InitiatingHeapOccupancyPercent always determines this threshold.

Internally, Adaptive IHOP tries to set the Initiating Heap Occupancy so that the first mixed garbage collection of the space-reclamation phase starts when the old generation occupancy is at a current maximum old generation size minus the value of -XX:G1HeapReservePercent as the extra buffer.

Marking

G1 marking uses an algorithm called Snapshot-At-The-Beginning (SATB) . It takes a virtual snapshot of the heap at the time of the Initial Mark pause, when all objects that were live at the start of marking are considered live for the remainder of marking. This means that objects that become dead (unreachable) during marking are still considered live for the purpose of space-reclamation (with some exceptions). This may cause some additional memory wrongly retained compared to other collectors. However, SATB potentially provides better latency during the Remark pause. The too conservatively considered live objects during that marking will be reclaimed during the next marking. See the Garbage-First Garbage Collector Tuning topic for more information about problems with marking.

Behavior in Very Tight Heap Situations

When the application keeps alive so much memory so that an evacuation can't find enough space to copy to, an evacuation failure occurs. Evacuation failure means that G1 tries to complete the current garbage collection by keeping any objects that have already been moved in their new location, and not copying any not yet moved objects, only adjusting references between the object. Evacuation failure may incur some additional overhead, but generally should be as fast as other young collections. After this garbage collection with the evacuation failure, G1 will resume the application as normal without any other measures. G1 assumes that the evacuation failure occurred close to the end of the garbage collection; that is, most objects were already moved and there is enough space left to continue running the application until marking completes and space-reclamation starts.

If this assumption doesn’t hold, then G1 will eventually schedule a Full GC. This type of collection performs in-place compaction of the entire heap. This might be very slow.

See Garbage-First Garbage Collector Tuning for more information about problems with allocation failure or Full GC's before signalling out of memory.

Humongous Objects

Humongous objects are objects larger or equal the size of half a region. The current region size is determined ergonomically as described in the Ergonomic Defaults for G1 GC section, unless set using the -XX:G1HeapRegionSize option.

These humongous objects are sometimes treated in special ways:

• Every humongous object gets allocated as a sequence of contiguous regions in the old generation. The start of the object itself is always located at the start of the first region in that sequence. Any leftover space in the last region of the sequence will be lost for allocation until the entire object is reclaimed.
• Generally, humongous objects can be reclaimed only at the end of marking during the Cleanup pause, or during Full GC if they became unreachable. There is, however, a special provision for humongous objects for arrays of primitive types for example, bool, all kinds of integers, and floating point values. G1 opportunistically tries to reclaim humongous objects if they are not referenced by many objects at any kind of garbage collection pause. This behavior is enabled by default but you can disable it with the option -XX:G1EagerReclaimHumongousObjects.
• Allocations of humongous objects may cause garbage collection pauses to occur prematurely. G1 checks the Initiating Heap Occupancy threshold at every humongous object allocation and may force an initial mark young collection immediately, if current occupancy exceeds that threshold.
• The humongous objects never move, not even during a Full GC. This can cause premature slow Full GCs or unexpected out-of-memory conditions with lots of free space left due to fragmentation of the region space.

Young-Only Phase Generation Sizing

During the young-only phase, the set of regions to collect (collection set), consists only of young generation regions. G1 always sizes the young generation at the end of a young-only collection. This way, G1 can meet the pause time goals that were set using -XX:MaxGCPauseTimeMillis and -XX:PauseTimeIntervalMillis based on long-term observations of actual pause time. It takes into account how long it took young generations of similar size to evacuate. This includes information like how many objects had to be copied during collection, and how interconnected these objects had been.

If not otherwise constrained, then G1 adaptively sizes the young generation size between the values that -XX:G1NewSizePercent and -XX:G1MaxNewSizePercent determine to meet pause-time. See Garbage-First Garbage Collector Tuning  for more information about how to fix long pauses.

Space-Reclamation Phase Generation Sizing

During the space-reclamation phase, G1 tries to maximize the amount of space that's reclaimed in the old generation in a single garbage collection pause. The size of the young generation is set to minimum allowed, typically as determined by -XX:G1NewSizePercent, and any old generation regions to reclaim space are added until G1 determines that adding further regions will exceed the pause time goal. In a particular garbage collection pause, G1 adds old generation regions in order of their reclamation efficiency, highest first, and the remaining available time to get the final collection set.

The number of old generation regions to take per garbage collection is bounded at the lower end by the number of potential candidate old generation regions (collection set candidate regions) to collect, divided by the length of the space-reclamation phase as determined by -XX:G1MixedGCCountTarget. The collection set candidate regions are all old generation regions that have an occupancy that's lower than -XX:G1MixedGCLiveThresholdPercent at the start of the phase.