Incremental Garbage Collector is halting my server for MINUTES at a time.
I have a Java server which services hundreds (currently 300-700 on average, target of 2000+) of simultaneous client connections, with a staggering number of long lived (but not permanent) objects.
The docs for incremental garbage collection state: "The incremental garbage collector, which is off by default, will eliminate occasional garbage-collection pauses during program execution." This is NOT true in my case. During peak load, the Server halts occasionally (once an hour or more) and entire MINUTES tick by. Average wait time is 2.5 - 3.5 minutes, the highest I have seen is 4 minutes, 10 seconds. This is entirely unnacceptable.
The server is on Red Hat Linux 6.2, kernel 2.2.14-5.0, with a gig of RAM. My current command line options are
java -server -Xincgc -Xms256M -Xmx900M
And I have just added -verbose:gc to help analyze the gc performance. I have read the gc tuning guide at http://java.sun.com/docs/hotspot/gc/index.html but still feel rather clueless about what is the optimum setup for my particular application.
I will of course start experimenting, but I was hoping to find a "wise old elf" who might give some useful pointers to accelerate the process, seeing as how the Server is already running in a production capacity, time is critical.
