Types of GC strategies

There are several different collector types of the GC. These types are also known as strategies and they are, in turn, realized by different implementations depending on the JVM manufacturer. Today, many different implementations exist and these are mixtures of the basic strategies. First, let's have a look at most common strategies of the Hotspot VM:

• The serial collector

• The parallel collector

• The concurrent collector

• The Garbage First (G1) collector

It should be noted that, within a strategy, different GC algorithms can be enabled for the young generation and the old generation, respectively—all to optimize memory management and performance.

The serial collector

The serial collector performs garbage collection using a single thread as shown in the following diagram. This thread stops all other JVM threads—a so called stop-the-world behavior. While it is a relatively efficient collector, since there is no communication overhead between threads, it cannot take advantage of...