I am running an application that creates and forgets large amounts of objects, the amount of long existing objects does grow slowly, but this is very little compared to short lived objects. This is a desktop application with high availability requirements, it needs to be turned on 24 hours per day. Most of the work is done on a single thread, this thread will just use all CPU it can get its hands.
In the past we have seen the following under heavy load:
The used heap space slowly goes up as the garbage collector collects less than the amount of memory newly allocated, the used heap size slowly grows and eventually comes near the specified max heap. At that point the garbage collector will kick in heavily and start using a huge amount of resources to prevent going over the max heap size. This slows the application down (easily 10x as slow) and at this point most of times the GC will succeed to clean up the garbage after a few minutes or fail and throw an OutOfMemoryException, both of them are not really acceptable.
The hardware used is a quad core processor with at least 4GB of memory running 64 bit Linux, all of that we can use if needed. Currently the application is heavily using a single core, which is using most of its time running a single core/thread. The other cores are mostly idle and could be used for garbage collection.
I have a feeling the garbage collector should be collecting more aggressively at an early stage, well before it runs out of memory. Our application does not have any throughput issues, low pause time requirements are a bit more important than throughput, but far less important than not getting near the max heap size. It is acceptable if the single busy thread runs at only 75% of the current speed, as long as it means the garbage collector can keep up with the creation. So in short, a steady decrease of performance is better than the sudden drop we see now.
I have read java garbage-collection heap-memory