The garbage collection gauge

Garbage collection can be used to evaluate application performance health. By monitoring garbage collection during the execution of a fixed workload, users gain insight as to whether the application is over-utilizing objects. Garbage collection can even be used to detect the presence of memory leaks.

Use the garbage collection and heap statistics in Tivoli Performance Viewer (see 16.3, Using Tivoli Performance Viewer) to evaluate application performance health. Mind that you have to enable the JVMPI facility (see Performance data provided by JVMPI) to get detailed garbage collection statistics. By monitoring garbage collection, memory leaks and overly used objects can be detected.

For this type of investigation, set the minimum and maximum heap sizes to the same value. Choose a representative, repetitive workload that matches production usage as closely as possible, user errors included. To ensure meaningful statistics, run the fixed workload until the state of the application is steady. Reaching this state usually takes several minutes.

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