How to Tune the Garbage Collector in Tomcat
The guys at PayPal recently switched away from Java, citing (perhaps false/questionable ?) performance gains. One important, but easily overlooked, way to keep your Java app performing at its best is to make sure that the JVM is well tuned to your needs – that includes taming the Garbage Collector.
If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution.
– Robert Sewell
Java’s Garbage Collector does an important job, and if you tune it properly, you can prevent memory intensive programs from freezing your system. It’s easy to assume that if you know how to develop large programs and applications, you probably already know how the Garbage Collection process works. Ergo if you choose the right Garbage Collector algorithm, it means you totally understand the features of the program you have developed.
If you’re not quite sure how the whole process works, we’ll try to summarise the most important aspects for you.
Meet the Garbage Collector, it will save your day!
You’ve just developed a large application, and you couldn’t be more excited! But, as this application runs, it creates objects; as it continues to run, many of these objects are no longer required and they cause your program to run out of memory for no apparent reason.
Hats off to Jelastic’s leading team
We all know the famous expression: “birds of a feather flock together”. This saying is perfect to describe the amazing group of people whose work made Jelastic the best Java and PHP PaaS in the world (in our opinion!). We wanted to show you who’s behind Jelastic so that you can see for yourself how it became the awesome platform you enjoy today.
Here’s a look at the headline acts:
Cloud hosting experts
Mark Zbikowski – Designer of MS-DOS
Mark Zbikowski, veteran Microsoft architect and developer, designed the DOS executable file format and was one of the key developers of Windows NTFS and Windows 2000/XP/Vista. However you feel about the Windows OS, there’s no denying the significant impact Mark’s prior innovations made. He began his career at Microsoft in 1981, working on DOS 1.0 as a designer, coder and liaison with IBM. His impressive career has also included significant involvement in OS/2, Cairo’s Object File System (OFS), and the NT File System (NTFS). Mark’s recent addition to the Jelastic team adds unrivalled technical expertise.
Introducing Apache TomEE cloud hosting
We’ve spent some time checking out Apache TomEE recently as we’ve added it to our Jelastic Cloud hosting platform. Although not as popular as other servers in the Java Enterprise Edition world, TomEE – pronounced “Tommy” – does a great job at delivering a fully operational, Java EE 6 Web Profile stack. It was founded by David Blevins, starting as part of the Apache OpenEJB project, and received the Java EE 6 Web Profile Compatible certification in Oct 2011.
UK Java Cloud Hosting – deploy a scalable app in minutes
We’re pleased to say that Jelastic, our scalable Java Cloud Hosting platform, has been performing great for the past 10 days. Many users have signed up to trial the platform in our free beta period. We’ve received a lot of very valuable feedback – everyone keeps telling us how fast, stable and easy-to-use our cloud is compared to our competitors and traditional Java hosting!
For those of you who have not tried our platform yet, here are a couple of videos to show you how easy it is to get started with your first applications deployed to the cloud in just a few minutes!
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Jelastic Java Cloud Hosting – UK beta launch
We are pleased to announce the free beta launch of our UK-hosted Jelastic Cloud Hosting platform.
As the exclusive hosting partner of Jelastic in the United Kingdom this is a very exciting time for us and our customers as we bring this innovative platform-as-a-service (PaaS) to our renowned hosting infrastructure and local network and datacentre for the UK and Irish markets, supported by our highly acclaimed 24×7 technical support team.
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