The taming of the shrew: increasing performance by automatic parameter tuning for java garbage collectors

Abstract

Garbage collection, if not tuned properly, can considerably impact application performance. Unfortunately, configuring a garbage collector is a tedious task as only few guidelines exist and tuning is often done by trial and error. We present what is, to our knowledge, the first published work on automatically tuning Java garbage collectors in a black-box manner considering all available parameters. We propose the use of iterated local search methods to automatically compute application-specific garbage collector configurations. Our experiments show that automatic tuning can reduce garbage collection time by up to 77% for a specific application and a specific workload and by 35% on average across all benchmarks (compared to the default configuration). We evaluated our approach for 3 different garbage collectors on the DaCapo and SPECjbb benchmarks, as well as on a real-world industrial application.