Summary

In this chapter we took an in-depth review of garbage collection as a critical pre-Java 9 platform component. Our review included object life cycle, garbage collection algorithms, garbage collection options, and methods related to garbage collection. We looked at upgrades to garbage collection in Java 8 and looked at a case study to help our understanding of modern garbage collection. We then turned our focus to the changes to garbage collection with the new Java 9 platform. Our exploration of garbage collection in Java 9 included looks at default garbage collection, depreciated garbage collection combinations, and unified garbage collection logging. We concluded our exploration of garbage collection by looking at a few garbage collection issues that persist, even after Java 9.

In the next chapter we will look at how to write performance tests using the Java Microbenchmark Harness (JMH), a Java harness library for writing benchmarks for the JVM.