Java (JVM) Memory Model

Java (JVM) Memory Model and Garbage Collection.

Java (JVM) Memory Model

As you can see in the above image, JVM memory is divided into separate parts. At broad level, JVM Heap memory is physically divided into two parts – Young Generation and Old Generation.

Young Generation

Young generation is the place where all the new objects are created. When young generation is filled, garbage collection is performed. This garbage collection is called Minor GC. Young Generation is divided into three parts – Eden Memory and two Survivor Memory spaces.

Important Points about Young Generation Spaces:

• Most of the newly created objects are located in the Eden memory space.
• When Eden space is filled with objects, Minor GC is performed and all the survivor objects are moved to one of the survivor spaces.
• Minor GC also checks the survivor objects and move them to the other survivor space. So at a time, one of the survivor space is always empty.
• Objects that are survived after many cycles of GC, are moved to the Old generation memory space. Usually it’s done by setting a threshold for the age of the young generation objects before they become eligible to promote to Old generation.

Old Generation

Old Generation memory contains the objects that are long lived and survived after many rounds of Minor GC. Usually garbage collection is performed in Old Generation memory when it’s full. Old Generation Garbage Collection is called Major GC and usually takes longer time.

Stop the World Event

All the Garbage Collections are “Stop the World” events because all application threads are stopped until the operation completes.
Since Young generation keeps short-lived objects, Minor GC is very fast and the application doesn’t get affected by this.
However Major GC takes longer time because it checks all the live objects. Major GC should be minimized because it will make your application unresponsive for the garbage collection duration. So if you have a responsive application and there are a lot of Major Garbage Collection happening, you will notice timeout errors.
The duration taken by garbage collector depends on the strategy used for garbage collection. That’s why it’s necessary to monitor and tune the garbage collector to avoid timeouts in the highly responsive applications.

Permanent Generation

Permanent Generation or “Perm Gen” contains the application metadata required by the JVM to describe the classes and methods used in the application. Note that Perm Gen is not part of Java Heap memory.
Perm Gen is populated by JVM at runtime based on the classes used by the application. Perm Gen also contains Java SE library classes and methods. Perm Gen objects are garbage collected in a full garbage collection.

Method Area

Method Area is part of space in the Perm Gen and used to store class structure (runtime constants and static variables) and code for methods and constructors.

Memory Pool

Memory Pools are created by JVM memory managers to create a pool of immutable objects, if implementation supports it. String Pool is a good example of this kind of memory pool. Memory Pool can belong to Heap or Perm Gen, depending on the JVM memory manager implementation.

Runtime Constant Pool

Runtime constant pool is per-class runtime representation of constant pool in a class. It contains class runtime constants and static methods. Runtime constant pool is the part of method area.

Java Stack Memory

Java Stack memory is used for execution of a thread. They contain method specific values that are short-lived and references to other objects in the heap that are getting referred from the method.

Java Heap Memory Switches

Java provides a lot of memory switches that we can use to set the memory sizes and their ratios. Some of the commonly used memory switches are:

VM Switch	VM Switch Description
-Xms	For setting the initial heap size when JVM starts
-Xmx	For setting the maximum heap size.
-Xmn	For setting the size of the Young Generation, rest of the space goes for Old Generation.
-XX:PermGen	For setting the initial size of the Permanent Generation memory
-XX:MaxPermGen	For setting the maximum size of Perm Gen
-XX:SurvivorRatio	For providing ratio of Eden space and Survivor Space, for example if Young Generation size is 10m and VM switch is -XX:SurvivorRatio=2 then 5m will be reserved for Eden Space and 2.5m each for both the Survivor spaces. The default value is 8.
-XX:NewRatio	For providing ratio of old/new generation sizes. The default value is 2.

Most of the times, above options are sufficient, but if you want to check out other options too then please check JVM Options Official Page.

Java Garbage Collection

Java Garbage Collection is the process to identify and remove the unused objects from the memory and free space to be allocated to objects created in the future processing. One of the best feature of java programming language is the automatic garbage collection, unlike other programming languages such as C where memory allocation and deallocation is a manual process.
Garbage Collector is the program running in the background that looks into all the objects in the memory and find out objects that are not referenced by any part of the program. All these unreferenced objects are deleted and space is reclaimed for allocation to other objects.
One of the basic way of garbage collection involves three steps:

1. Marking: This is the first step where garbage collector identifies which objects are in use and which ones are not in use.
2. Normal Deletion: Garbage Collector removes the unused objects and reclaim the free space to be allocated to other objects.
3. Deletion with Compacting: For better performance, after deleting unused objects, all the survived objects can be moved to be together. This will increase the performance of allocation of memory to newer objects.

There are two problems with simple mark and delete approach.

1. First one is that it’s not efficient because most of the newly created objects will become unused
2. Secondly objects that are in-use for multiple garbage collection cycle are most likely to be in-use for future cycles too.

The above shortcomings with the simple approach is the reason that Java Garbage Collection is Generational and we have Young Generation and Old Generation spaces in the heap memory. I have already explained above how objects are scanned and moved from one generational space to another based on the Minor GC and Major GC.

Java Garbage Collection Types

There are five types of garbage collection types that we can use in our applications. We just need to use JVM switch to enable the garbage collection strategy for the application. Let’s look at each of them one by one.

1. Serial GC (-XX:+UseSerialGC): Serial GC uses the simple mark-sweep-compact approach for young and old generations garbage collection i.e Minor and Major GC. Serial GC is useful in client-machines such as our simple stand alone applications and machines with smaller CPU. It is good for small applications with low memory footprint.
2. Parallel GC (-XX:+UseParallelGC): Parallel GC is same as Serial GC except that is spawns N threads for young generation garbage collection where N is the number of CPU cores in the system. We can control the number of threads using -XX:ParallelGCThreads=n JVM option. Parallel Garbage Collector is also called throughput collector because it uses multiple CPUs to speed up the GC performance. Parallel GC uses single thread for Old Generation garbage collection.
3. Parallel Old GC (-XX:+UseParallelOldGC): This is same as Parallel GC except that it uses multiple threads for both Young Generation and Old Generation garbage collection.
4. Concurrent Mark Sweep (CMS) Collector (-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC): CMS Collector is also referred as concurrent low pause collector. It does the garbage collection for Old generation. CMS collector tries to minimize the pauses due to garbage collection by doing most of the garbage collection work concurrently with the application threads. CMS collector on young generation uses the same algorithm as that of the parallel collector. This garbage collector is suitable for responsive applications where we can’t afford longer pause times. We can limit the number of threads in CMS collector using -XX:ParallelCMSThreads=n JVM option.
5. G1 Garbage Collector (-XX:+UseG1GC): The Garbage First or G1 garbage collector is available from Java 7 and it’s long term goal is to replace the CMS collector. The G1 collector is a parallel, concurrent, and incrementally compacting low-pause garbage collector. Garbage First Collector doesn’t work like other collectors and there is no concept of Young and Old generation space. It divides the heap space into multiple equal-sized heap regions. When a garbage collection is invoked, it first collects the region with lesser live data, hence “Garbage First”. You can find more details about it at Garbage-First Collector Oracle Documentation.