Using ZGC with multi-terabyte heaps can have several performance implications:
1. Low Latency: ZGC is designed to minimize pause times, ensuring that the application remains responsive even with large heaps. It achieves this by performing most garbage collection work concurrently with the application, resulting in pause times of less than 10ms[3][4].
2. High Throughput: ZGC is designed to provide high throughput by minimizing the time spent on garbage collection. This ensures that the application can continue to run efficiently even under heavy memory usage[2][4].
3. Multi-Mapping: ZGC uses multi-mapping to map different ranges of virtual memory to the same physical memory. This can lead to increased memory usage, as the operating system may report 3x larger memory usage due to the additional mappings[1].
4. Colored Pointers: ZGC uses colored pointers to store metadata in 64-bit pointers. This can create additional work when dereferencing pointers, but the multi-mapping technique helps mitigate this overhead[2].
5. NUMA-Aware: ZGC is designed to be NUMA-aware, which means it can efficiently handle large heaps and multiple CPU cores. This ensures that the garbage collector can take advantage of the available hardware resources[2][4].
6. Tuning Options: ZGC has several tuning options, such as setting the maximum heap size and the number of concurrent GC threads. These options can help balance memory usage and garbage collection performance[3][4].
7. Experimental Feature: ZGC is an experimental feature and requires specific command-line options to enable. It is suitable for applications that require very short pause times and can handle large memory allocations[1][3].
In summary, using ZGC with multi-terabyte heaps can provide low latency, high throughput, and efficient memory management. However, it requires careful tuning and may lead to increased memory usage due to multi-mapping.
Citations:[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62926652/the-java-zgc-garbage-collector-uses-a-lot-of-memory
[2] https://www.opsian.com/blog/javas-new-zgc-is-very-exciting/
[3] https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/11/gctuning/z-garbage-collector1.html
[4] https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2021/11/02/how-choose-best-java-garbage-collector
[5] https://dzone.com/articles/java-z-garbage-collector-zgc-a-deep-dive-with-exam