Garbage Collector Threads

[Alim Atar]

Hello All,

I have some questions about GC threads,

1) Are Garbage collector threads(many invloed in collection) GREEN threads?

2)Does java1.6/1.7 support Greent threads?
If YES then how we can create GREEN threads?
If NO then why java stopped supporting GREEN threads?(just an overview)

3) Can we create more GC Threads ? Strange question but idea might be very useful in case of memory centric applications.


Hoping for answer ranchers,

Regards,
Alim

[Peter Johnson]

1) All threads, including GC threads, are native OS threads. At least for the Sun JVM, and I suspect for other JVMs as well.

2) I do not think so.

3) Use this option: -XX:ParallelGCThreads=N where N is the desired number of threads. Starting with JVM 5, if your system has at least 2 CPUs (or cores) and at least 2GB of RAM, then the JVM will automatically run a parallel collector for the young generation. It will assign 1 thread for each CPU up to 8, then 5 threads for every 8 CPUs after that. I suggest that you never run more GC threads than you have CPUs otherwise the collection will run slower due to the context switching among threads.

[Alim Atar]

Thanks lot Peter for your nice answers.