Java Interview Questions and Answers 32

What are generations in Garbage Collection terminology? What is its relevance?
Garbage Collectors make assumptions about how our application runs. Most common assumption is that an object is most likely to die shortly after it was created: called infant mortality. This assumes that an object that has been around for a while, will likely stay around for a while. GC organizes objects into generations (young, tenured, and perm). This tells that if an object lives for more than certain period of time it is moved from one generation to another generations( say from young -> tenured -> permanent). Hence GC will be run more frequently at the young generations and rarely at permanent generations. This reduces the overhead on GC and gives faster response time.

What is a Throughput Collector?
The throughput collector is a generational collector similar to the default collector but with multiple threads used to do the minor collection. The major collections are essentially the same as with the default collector. By default on a host with N CPUs, the throughput collector uses N garbage collector threads in the collection. The number of garbage collector threads can be controlled with a command line option.

When to Use the Throughput Collector?
Use the throughput collector when you want to improve the performance of your application with larger numbers of processors. In the default collector garbage collection is done by one thread, and therefore garbage collection adds to the serial execution time of the application. The throughput collector uses multiple threads to execute a minor collection and so reduces the serial execution time of the application. A typical situation is one in which the application has a large number of threads allocating objects. In such an application it is often the case that a large young generation is needed

What is Aggressive Heap?
The -XX:+AggressiveHeap option inspects the machine resources (size of memory and number of processors) and attempts to set various parameters to be optimal for long-running, memory allocation-intensive jobs. It was originally intended for machines with large amounts of memory and a large number of CPUs, but in the J2SE platform, version 1.4.1 and later it has shown itself to be useful even on four processor machines. With this option the throughput collector (-XX:+UseParallelGC) is used along with adaptive sizing (-XX:+UseAdaptiveSizePolicy). The physical memory on the machines must be at least 256MB before Aggressive Heap can be used.

What is a Concurrent Low Pause Collector?
The concurrent low pause collector is a generational collector similar to the default collector. The tenured generation is collected concurrently with this collector. This collector attempts to reduce the pause times needed to collect the tenured generation. It uses a separate garbage collector thread to do parts of the major collection concurrently with the applications threads. The concurrent collector is enabled with the command line option -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC. For each major collection the concurrent collector will pause all the application threads for a brief period at the beginning of the collection and toward the middle of the collection. The second pause tends to be the longer of the two pauses and multiple threads are used to do the collection work during that pause. The remainder of the collection is done with a garbage collector thread that runs concurrently with the application. The minor collections are done in a manner similar to the default collector, and multiple threads can optionally be used to do the minor collection.

When to Use the Concurrent Low Pause Collector?
Use the concurrent low pause collector if your application would benefit from shorter garbage collector pauses and can afford to share processor resources with the garbage collector when the application is running. Typically applications which have a relatively large set of long-lived data (a large tenured generation), and run on machines with two or more processors tend to benefit from the use of this collector. However, this collector should be considered for any application with a low pause time requirement. Optimal results have been observed for interactive applications with tenured generations of a modest size on a single processor.

What is Incremental Low Pause Collector?
The incremental low pause collector is a generational collector similar to the default collector. The minor collections are done with the same young generation collector as the default collector. Do not use either -XX:+UseParallelGC or -XX:+UseParNewGC with this collector. The major collections are done incrementally on the tenured generation. This collector (also known as the train collector) collects portions of the tenured generation at each minor collection. The goal of the incremental collector is to avoid very long major collection pauses by doing portions of the major collection work at each minor collection. The incremental collector will sometimes find that a non-incremental major collection (as is done in the default collector) is required in order to avoid running out of memory.

When to Use the Incremental Low Pause Collector?
Use the incremental low pause collector when your application can afford to trade longer and more frequent young generation garbage collection pauses for shorter tenured generation pauses. A typical situation is one in which a larger tenured generation is required (lots of long-lived objects), a smaller young generation will suffice (most objects are short-lived and don't survive the young generation collection), and only a single processor is available.

How do you enable the concurrent garbage collector on Sun's JVM?
-Xconcgc options allows us to use concurrent garbage collector (1.2.2_07+)we can also use -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC which is available beginning with J2SE 1.4.1.

What is a platform?
A platform is the hardware or software environment in which a program runs. Most platforms can be described as a combination of the operating system and hardware, like Windows 2000 and XP, Linux, Solaris, and MacOS.

What is transient variable?
Transient variable can't be serialize. For example if a varaiable is declared as transient in a Serializable class and the class is written to an ObjectStream, the value of the variable can't be written to the stream instead when the class is retrieved from the ObjectStream the value of the variable becomes null.