Dealing with expensive garbage collection

You might encounter situations where you have a number of applications running in the Java Virtual Machine and the garbage collection process takes too long to run. Even though this issue occurs, probably you might not be aware of what exactly is happening. In this section, we will learn how to deal with such garbage collections that take too long to execute.

We start by running the following command:

java –Xmx2048M –Xms512m –jar start.jar

After a certain time period, we noticed that Solr starts to hang frequently for a shorter time period and doesn't even respond during this time span, and it is the same with Jetty. This abnormal behavior of responding and not responding is an indication that our garbage collection is taking too long to execute. How are we going to overcome this issue?

Let us modify our Solr start command and see what happens. Now our command looks as follows:

java –Xmx2048M –Xms512m -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:+UseParNewGC -XX:ParallelGCThreads...