java scheduler 性能_关于 Java 性能方面的 9 个谬论

6. All apps need to be concerned about Stop-The-World

A fact of life of the Java platform is that all application threads must periodically stop to allow Garbage Collection to run. This is sometimes brandished as a serious weakness, even in the absence of any real evidence.

Empirical studies have shown that human beings cannot normally perceive changes in numeric data (e.g. price movements) occurring more frequently than once every 200ms.

Consequently for applications that have a human as their primary user, a useful rule of thumb is that Stop-The-World (STW) pause of 200ms or under is usually of no concern. Some applications (e.g. streaming video) need lower GC jitter than this, but many GUI applications will not.

There are a minority of applications (such as low-latency trading, or mechanical control systems) for which a 200ms pause is unacceptable. Unless your application is in that minority it is unlikely your users will perceive any impact from the garbage collector.

It is also worth mentioning that in any system where there are more application threads than physical cores, the operating system scheduler will have to intervene to time-slice access to the CPUs. Stop-The-World sounds scary, but in practice, every application (whether JVM or not) has to deal with contended access to scarce compute resources.

Without measurement, it isn't clear that the JVM's approach has any meaningful additional impact on application performance.

In summary, determine whether pause times are actually affecting your application by turning on GC logs. Analyze the logs (either by hand, or with scripting or a tool) to determine the pause times. Then decide whether these really pose a problem for your application domain. Most importantly, ask yourself a most poignant question: have any users actually complained?