Understanding the Java Virtual Machine: Memory Management

Garbage Collection is a key part of Java. Understanding how GC works will allow you to understand how the Java Virtual Machine works. It will also help you to write better applications and improve your applications' performance. This course will cover all aspects of garbage collection. It will include a discussion of the 'young and 'old generation', how objects are moved between eden spaces and survivor areas, how memory is promoted to the 'old generation', the different garbage collectors and their effects on the running of your application. We will also examine 'card tables' to see how they manage memory in the older generation. We'll be looking at each garbage collector, including the parallel and serial collectors; and the CMS collector and G1 collector. We will also cover the tools that you can use to monitor GC, including VisualVM and jstat. We will also discuss how you can interact with the GC using classes Soft, Weak and PhantomReference, as well as their helpers ReferenceQueue, WeakHashMap.