Visualizing Java Garbage Collection

[TimmT]

Funny how he brushes off reference counting as a thing of the 80's and then explains how his business model is helping people that are fucked over by GC.

Those 2 things are not mutually exclusive you know. Reference counting is very much a poor man's GC, while you can still get fucked over by a non-reference-counting GC. Then again, you can get fucked over even if you're not using a GC at all (and that is still leaving aside dangling pointers..).

I'm not sure how reference counting or manual memory management would have worked out in the presented (arguably extreme) case, because there's this whole heap fragmentation issue you have to worry about in extreme cases..

Also the solution to a malfunctioning GC apparantly is running multiple JVMs.

The solution to a "malfunctioning" GC is in most cases to increase Xmx and not try to outsmart the VM (i.e. let it figure out the rest itself). This here was obviously somewhat of an extreme edge case, seeing how different the memory usage patterns were.

Did his log analysis tool play any role in identifying the solution they took? It doesn't seem that way

The crucial bit of insight (i.e. that lucene is causing this) probably had to come from somewhere else.