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