Java -verbose:gc Performance Implications?

Question

Just wondering if enabling verbose GC would have any effect on the performance of an application.

My guess is no not really.

I know that enabling verbose GC can output a fair bit data and was wondering is this realistically going to have any effect on performance?

Answer 1

Anything that outputs to file/console will incur some I/O overhead. Tacking an extra couple ms latency onto every garbage collection event certainly could have some effect on performance.

Realistically speaking though, your application would have to be going through a lot of them and be under quite some load before you'd notice. It's very hard to tell without testing.