Introduction

Poorly tuned garbage collection (GC) is one of the most common causes for interruptions in Java applications, and this includes Oracle SOA Suite 11g. This chapter is devoted to looking at some techniques that will help you tune the garbage collector in your JVM.

Garbage collection is the process and set of techniques by which the JVM frees up memory that holds the data which is no longer relevant, making it available to applications again. By removing the burden of tracking (when allocated memory is no longer needed) from the developer, Java increased the productivity of application developers, and because many application bugs are caused by memory leaks and other memory problems, the stability of applications also improved. However, the process of tracking which memory allocations are no longer needed is non-trivial; a method that works well on one set of circumstances may not work well in another.

There are a large number of settings related to the JVM garbage collector that...