I was messing around with some of the settings in the Java 8 VM. I have been playing around with Spring Boot lately. So I have a minimal webapp in Spring boot, that has a couple of entities, and services and controllers. I have it configured to run as a standalone jar with an embedded tomcat 8 server. When I do a java -server -jar myapp.jar Spring boot launches my app and when it finishes loading the java process is sitting at 870,160K of memory.

Then I launched my app as: java -server -XX:+UseG1GC -XX:+UseStringDeduplication -jar myapp.jar Spring Boot launches the app and when it finished loading it was using 525,076K. That seems like a pretty big savings to me, and I was seeing some even more dramatic results when I was testing over the weekend like a memory size of 900,000K for the first case and 366,000K for the second case. Either way I have to think that if I were to launch a site today on something like Amazon EC2, where the cost goes up quite a bit as the memory rises I would be strongly tempted to try to run on this GC. I know the tests I have seen show this isn’t quite as fast as ConcMarkSweep and some of the other options, but if you are memory constrained I think it would be worth testing to see if this is fast enough. This test was run under a 64bit Java 8 Update 25 VM under Windows 7 (with 8 GB of Ram on the machine).