Tuning JVM (GC) for high responsive server application

Question

I am running an application server on Linux 64bit with 8 core CPUs and 6 GB memory.

The server must be highly responsive.

After some inspection I found that

Answer 1

You may be interested in trying the low-pause Garbage-First collector instead of concurrent mark-sweep (although it's not necessarily more performant for all collections, it's supposed to have a better worst case). It's enabled by -XX:+UseG1GC and is supposed to be really awesomesauce, but you may want to give it a thorough evaluation before using it in production. It has probably improved since, but it seems to have been a bit buggy a year ago, as seen in Experience with JDK 1.6.x G1 (“Garbage First”)