garbage collector - controlling it
The main performance problem on our website right now is from the garbage collector. Yes, our site is very 'thick', but the gc locks out other threads for 10 seconds or so regularly, and once a day or locks it up for several MINUTES. The main problem is that we have a few very large objects that never go away, but the gc still has to occasionally scan them.
I developed a way to put the two GarbageCollector threads (per vm) into the lowest priority. I've seen documentation that this is where they are supposed to be anyway, but they are really at the normal level with everything else. This works great on NT, but only works ok on Solaris. On NT, the gc still pegs the cpu, but other threads are almost unnaffected.
Anyway, my bosses are concerned about this fix, wondering what negative impact it will have or if the gc won't get enough time or whatever.
I just wondered what you all think of this fix. Has anyone else tried it?
Also, does anyone know of a way to tell the gc not to every scan certain objects?
