How to tame java GC pauses? Surviving 16GiB heap and greater.

Memory is cheap and abundant on modern servers. Unfortunately there is a serious obstacle for using these memory resources to their full in Java programs. Garbage collector pauses are a serious treat for a JVM with a large heap size. There are very few good sources of information about practical tuning of Java GC and unfortunately they seem to be relevant for 512MiB - 2GiB heaps size. Recently I have spent a good amount of time investigating performance of various JVMs with 32GiB heap size. In this article I would like to provide practical guidelines for tuning HotSpot JVM for large heap sizes.

Full article is available at Javalobby http://java.dzone.com/articles/how-tame-java-gc-pauses

Understanding GC pauses in JVM, HotSpot's CMS collector.

Concurrent Mark Sweep (CMS) is one of HotSpot JVM low pause garbage collectors. CMS can do most of its work for reclaiming memory concurrently with application (without stopping it). But still it requires few stop-the-world pauses to make its work. This article will explain nature of these pauses and how to minimize them.

Basics of concurrent mark sweep

HotSpot’s CMS is a generational collector, it means that heap is separated into young and old (tenured) space and these spaces are collected independently. For young space collection usual HotSpot’s copy collector is use (see previous article about HotSpot’s young space collector).  To enable of using CMS collector you have to specify ‑XX: +UseConcMarkSweepGC in JVM’s command line.

Concurrent Mark Sweep is used only to collect old space. CMS collection cycle has following phases:

• Initial mark – this is stop-the-world phase while CMS is collecting root references.
•  Concurrent mark – this phase is done concurrently with application, garbage collector traverses though object graph in old space marking live objects.
• Concurrent pre clean – this is another concurrent phase, basically it is another mark phase which will try to account references changed during previous mark phase. Main reason for this phase is reduce time of stop-the-world remark phase.
• Remark – once concurrent mark is finished, garbage collector need one more stop-the-world pause to account references which have been changed during concurrent mark phase.
• Concurrent sweep – garbage collector will scan through whole old space and reclaim space occupied by unreachable objects.
• Concurrent reset – after CMS cycle is finished, some structures have to be reset before next cycle can start.

Unlike most other garbage collectors, CMS does not do compaction of heap space. Instead of moving objects to make unoccupied space continuous, CMS keeps lists of all fragments of free memory. This way CMS is avoiding cost associated with relocating of live objects (and relocating of objects is expensive operation which require stop-the-world pause), but as down size of this heap space is prone to fragmentation. To minimize risk of fragmentation CMS is doing statistical analysis of object’s sizes and have separate free lists for objects of different sizes.

Length of CMS pauses

CMS itself has only two pauses, but your application will also experience pauses of young space collector which is working in conjunction with CMS. See previous article about pauses of young space collector.

Initial mark

During   initial mark CMS should collect all root references to start marking of old space. This includes:

• References from thread stacks,
• References from young space.

References from stacks are usually collected very quickly (less than 1ms), but time to collect references from young space depends on size of objects in young space. Normally initial mark starts right after young space collection, so Eden space is empty and only live objects are in one of survivor space. Survivor space is usually small and initial mark after young space collection often takes less than millisecond. But if initial mark is started when Eden is full it may take quite long (usually longer than young space collection itself).

Once CMS collection is triggered, JVM may wait some time for young collection to happen before it will start initial marking. JVM configuration option –XX:CMSWaitDuration=<t> can be used to set how long CMS will wait for young space collection before start of initial marking. If you want to avoid long initial marking pauses, you should configure this time to be longer than typical period of young collections in your application.

Remark

Most of marking is done in parallel with application, but it may not be accurate because application may modify object graph during marking. When concurrent marking is finished; garbage collector should stop application and repeat marking to be sure that all reachable objects marked as alive. But collector doesn’t have to traverse through whole object graph; it should traverse only reference modified since start of marking (actually since start pre clean phase). Card table (see card marking write barrier) is used to identify modified portions of memory in old space, but thread stacks and young space should be scanned once again.

 Usually most time of remark phase is spent of scanning young space. This time will be much shorter if we collect garbage in young space before starting of remark. We can instruct JVM to always force young space collection before CMS remark. Use JVM parameter –XX:+CMSScavengeBeforeRemark to enable this option.

Even is young space is empty, remark phase still have to scan through modified references in old space, this usually takes time close to normal young collection pause (due scanning of old space done during young collection is similar to scanning required for remark).

When CMS collection starts?

Unlike stop-the-world old space collectors, CMS collection cycle should start before old space become full. CMS collection is triggered when amount of free memory in old space falls below certain threshold (this threshold can be chosen by JVM based of runtime statistics or set via parameters) and actual start of CMS collection cycle may be delayed until next young collection.

Normally objects are allocated in old space only during young space collection (which may promote some objects to old space). So CMS cycle usually starts right after young space collection, which is good because init mark pause will be very small.

But in certain cases object may be allocated directly in old space and CMS cycle could start while Eden has lots of objects. In this case initial mark can be 10-100 times slower which is bad. Usually this is happening due to allocation of very large objects (few megabyte arrays).  To avoid these long pauses you should configure reasonable –XX:CMSWaitDuration.

Configuring fixed threshold for CMS start

You can set fixed threshold for olds space occupation for triggering CMS cycle by using JVM options ‑XX:+UseCMSInitiatingOccupancyOnly ‑XX:CMSInitiatingOccupancyFraction=70 (this will force CMS cycle to start when more than 70% of old space is used).

Explicitly invoking CMS cycle

You can also configure JVM to start CMS cycle by invocation of System.gc() by ‑XX:+ExplicitGCInvokesConcurrent command line option.

Full GC with CMS

If CMS cannot free enough in old space, JVM may fallback to compacting collector. Compacting collector will force stop-the-world pause so it can be considered emergency case. Normally you would like to avoid full GC and long stop-the-world pause associated with it. Full GC may happen either if CMS is not fast enough for dealing with garbage (or collection cycle has been started too late) or due to fragmentation of old space (there is no large enough continuous space for object to be allocated). Also it is possible that you just didn’t give JVM enough memory and after full GC it will through OutOfMemoryExpection anyway.

Permanent generation collection

One of reasons why CMS may end up in full GC is garbage in permanent space. By default CMS does not reclaim unused space in permanent space. If your application is using multiple class loaders and/or reflection you may need to enable collecting of garbage in permanent space. JVM option ‑XX:+CMSClassUnloadingEnabled will allow CMS collector to clean permanent space. Remember that objects in permanent space may have references to normal old space thus even if permanent space is not full itself, references from perm to old space may keep some dead objects unreachable for CMS if class unloading is not enabled.

Utilizing multiple cores

CMS has multiple phases. Some of them are concurrent; others are stop-the-world pauses but may be executed in parallel to compressed application freeze time.

‑XX:+CMSConcurrentMTEnabled – allows CMS to use multiple cores for concurrent phase.

‑XX:ConcGCThreads=<n> – specifies number of thread for concurrent phases.

‑XX:ParallelGCThreads=<n> – specifies number of thread for parallel work during stop-the-world pauses (by default it equals to number of physical cores).

‑XX:+UseParNewGC – instructs JVM to use parallel collector for young space collections in conjunction with CMS.

See also

HotSpot JVM garbage collection options cheat sheet 
Java GC, HotSpot's CMS and heap fragmentation
Other articles about garbage collection in this blog

Understanding GC pauses in JVM, HotSpot's minor GC.

Stop the world pauses of JVM due to work of garbage collector are known foes of java based application. HotSpot JVM has a set of very advanced and tunable garbage collectors, but to find optimal configuration it is very important to understand an exact mechanics garbage collection algorithms. This article one of series explaining how exactly GC spends our precious CPU cycle during stop-the-world pauses. An algorithm for young space garbage collection in HotSpot is explained in this issue.

Structure of heap

Most of modern GCs are generational. That means java heap memory is separated into few spaces. Spaces are usually distinguished by “age” of objects. Objects are allocated in young space, then, if they survive long enough, eventually promoted to old (tenured) space. That approach rely on hypothesis that most object “die young”, i.e. majority of objects are becoming garbage shortly after being allocated. All HotSpot garbage collectors are separating memory into 5 spaces (though for G1 collector spaces may not be continuous).

• Eden are space there objects are allocated,
• Survivor spaces are used to receive object during young (or minor GC),
• Tenured space is for long lived objects,
• Permanent space is for JVM own objects (like classes and JITed code), it is behaves very like tenured space so we will ignore it for rest of article.

Eden and 2 survivor spaces together are called young space.

HotSpot GC algorithms overview

HotSpot JVM is implementing few algorithms for GC which are combined in few possible GC profiles.

• Serial generational collector (-XX:+UseSerialGC).
• Parallel for young space, serial for old space generational collector (-XX:+UseParallelGC).
• Parallel young and old space generational collector (-XX:+UseParallelOldGC).
• Concurrent mark sweep with serial young space collector (-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC
  –XX:-UseParNewGC).
• Concurrent mark sweep with parallel young space collector (-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC –XX:+UseParNewGC).
• G1 garbage collector (-XX:+UseG1GC).

All profiles except G1 are using almost same young space collection algorithms (with serial vs parallel variations).

Write barrier

Key point of generational GC is what it does need to collect entire heap each time, but just portion of it (e.g. young space). But to achieve this JVM have to implement special machinery called “write barrier”. There 2 types of write barriers implemented in HotSpot: dirty cards and snapshot-at-the-beginning (SATB). SATB write barrier is used in G1 algorithms (which is not covered in this article). All other algorithms are using dirty cards.

Dirty cards write-barrier (card marking)

Principle of dirty card write-barrier is very simple. Each time when program modifies reference in memory, it should mark modified memory page as dirty. There is a special card table in JVM and each 512 byte page of memory has associated byte in card table.

Young space collection algorithm

Almost all new objects (there are few exception when new object can be allocated directly in old space) are allocated in Eden space. To be more effective HotSpot is using thread local allocation blocks (TLAB) for allocation of new objects, but TLAB themselves are allocated in Eden. Once Eden becomes full minor GC is triggered. Goal of minor GC is to clear fresh garbage in Eden space. Copy-collection algorithm is used (live objects are copied to another space, and then whole space is marked as free memory). But before start collecting live objects, JVM should find all root references. Root references for minor GC are references from stack and all references from old space.

Normally collection of all reference from old space will require scanning through all objects in old space. That is why we need write-barrier. All objects in young space have been created (or relocated) since last reset of write-barrier, so non-dirty pages cannot have references into young space. This means we can scan only object in dirty pages.

Once initial reference set is collected, dirty cards are reset and JVM starts coping of live objects from Eden and one of survivor spaces into other survivor space. JVM only need to spend time on live objects. Relocating of object also requires updating of references pointing to it.

While JVM is updating references to relocated object, memory pages get marked again, so we can be sure what on next young GC only dirty pages has references to young space.

Finally we have Eden and one survivor space clean (and ready for allocation) and one survivor space filled with objects.

Object promotion

If object is not cleared during young GC it will be eventually copied (promoted) to old space. Promotion occurs in following situations:

• -XX:+AlwaysTenure  makes JVM to promote objects directly to old space instead of survivor  space (survivor spaces are not used in this case).
• once survivor space is full, all remaining live object are relocated directly to old space.
• If object has survived certain number of young space collections, it will be promoted to old space (required number of collections can be adjusted using –XX:MaxTenuringThreshold option and –XX:TargetSurvivorRatio JVM options).

Allocation of new objects in old space

It would be beneficial if we could possibly allocate long lived objects directly in old space. Unfortunately there is no way to instruct JVM to do this for particular object. But there are few cases when object can be allocated directly in old space.

• Option -XX:PretenureSizeThreshold=<n> instructs JVM what all objects larger  than <n> bytes should be allocated directly in old space (though if object size fits TLAB, JVM will allocate it in TLAB and thus young space, so you should also limit TLAB size).
• If object is larger than size of Eden space it also will be allocated in old space.

Unlike application objects, system objects are always allocated by JVM directly in permanent space.

Parallel execution

Most of task during young space collection can be done in parallel. If there are several CPUs available, JVM can utilize them to compress duration of stop-the-world pause during collection. Number of threads can be configured in HotSpot JVM by –XX:ParallelGCTreads= parameter. By default JVM will choose number of thread by number of available CPU. As expected, serial version of collector will ignore this parameter because it can use only one CPU. Using parallel collection reduces time of stop-the-world pause by factor close to number of physical cores.

Time of young GC

Young space collection happens during stop-the-world pause (all non-GC-related threads in JVM are suspended). Wall clock time of stop-the-world pause is very important factor for applications (especially applications requiring fast response time). Parallel execution affects wall clock time of pause but not work effort to be done.

Let’s summarize components of young GC pause. Total pause time can be written as:

T_young = T_{stack_scan} + T_card__scan + T_old__scan+ T_copy ; there T_young is total time of young GC pause, T_{stack_scan} is time to scan root in stacks, T_card__scan is time to scan card table to find dirty pages, T_old__scan  is time to scan roots in old space and T_copy is time to copy live objects (1).

Thread stack are usually very small, so major factors affecting time of young GC is T_card__scan , T_old__scan and T_copy.

Another important parameter is frequency of young GC. Period between young collections is mainly determined by application allocation rate (bytes per second) and size of Eden space.

P_young = S_eden / R_alloc ; there P_young  is period between young GC, S_eden is size of Eden and R_alloc is rate of memory allocations (bytes per second) (2).

T_{stack_scan} – can be considered application specific constant.

T_{card_scan} – is proportional to size of old space. Literally, JVM have to check single byte of table for each 512 bytes of heap (e.g. 8G of heap -> 16m to scan).

T_old__scan  – is proportional to number of dirty cards in old space at the moment of young GC. If we assume that references to young space are distributed randomly in old space, then we can provide following formula for time of old space scanning.

; there S_old is size of old space and D, k_card and n_card are coefficients specific for application (3).

T_copy – is proportional to number of live objects in heap. We can approximate it by formula:

There k_copy is effort to copy object, R_{long_live} is rate of allocation of long lived objects,  

(k_survive usually very small), and k_tenure is a coefficient to approximate aging of object in young space before tenuring (k_tenure ≥ 1) (4).

Now we can analyze how various JVM options may affect time and frequency of young GC.

Size of old space.

Size of old space is affecting T_{card_scan} and T_{old_scan} part of young GC pause time according to formulas above. So we as we are increasing size of old space (read total heap size) time of young GC pauses will grow and it cannot be helped. After certain size of heap (usually 4-8 Gb) time of young collection is dominated by T_{card_scan} (technically T_copy can be even greater than T_{card_scan} , but it usually can be controlled by tuning of other GC options).

HotSpot JVM options:

-Xmx=<n> -Xms=<n>

Size of Eden space 

Period between young GC is proportional to size of Eden. T_copy is also proportional to size of eden but in practice k_survive can be so small that for some applications we can forget about Tcopy. Unfortunately time between young GC will also affect coefficient D in equation (4). Though dependency between D and P_young is very application specific, increasing P_young will increase D and as a consequence T_{scan_old}.

HotSpot JVM options:

-XX:NewSize=<n> -XX:MaxNewSize=<n>

Size of survivor space. 

Size of survivor space puts hard limit of how much objects can stay in young space between collections. Changing size of survivor space may affect k_tenure (or mat not, e.g. if k_tenure is already 1).

HotSpot JVM options:

-XX:SurviorRatio=<n>

Max tenuring threshold and target survivor ratio 

These two JVM options also allow artificially adjust k_tenure.

HotSpot JVM options:

-XX:TargetSurviorRatio=<n>
‑XX:MaxTenuringThreshold=<n>
-XX:+AlwaysTenure
-XX:+NeverTenure

Pretenuring threshold 

For certain applications using pretenuring threshold could reduce k_survive due to allocation of long lived object directly in old space.

HotSpot JVM options:

-XX:PretenureThreshold=<n>

See also

Other articles about garbage collection in this blog