The art of GC Tuning

Great presentation discussing best practices when tuning Garbage Collection on the JVM

The different GC Collectors:

Fragmented Heap:

See JVM GC tuning docs here

Also, a comparison of all the JVM GC implementations (particularly valuable given that Java8 will incorporate JRockit's features.

I've came across this links by reading the blog post on the new features of Cassandra 1.0. Some very interesting JVM tuning allowed them to increase performance manyfolds.

The JVM JIT compiler at runtime, and even the java and particularly scala compiler at compile time, love small methods that can be analysed in isolation. It is very important to consider the effect that the compiler can have whenever reading microbenchmarks.

Quoting Brian Goetz:

"Often, the way to write fast code in Java applications is to write dumb code -- code that is straightforward, clean, and follows the most obvious object-oriented principles."
Brian Goetz
Technology Evangelist, Sun Microsystems

For huge collections, is better to use a framework that can handle billions of items, potentially mapped outside of the heap, thus avoiding Full GC completely.