Summary
Make G1 the default garbage collector on 32- and 64-bit server configurations.
Motivation
Limiting GC pause times is, in general, more important than maximizing throughput. Switching to a low-pause collector such as G1 should provide a better overall experience, for most users, than a throughput-oriented collector such as the Parallel GC, which is currently the default.
Many performance improvements were made to G1 in JDK 8 and its update releases, and further improvements are planned for JDK 9. The introduction of concurrent class unloading (JEP 156) in JDK 8u40 made G1 a fully-featured garbage collector, ready to be the default.