JVM memory management & garbage collection book?

Question

Hi. Could anyone advice a book (or any other source) that would thoroughly reveal internals of JVM memory management & garbage collection (optimization, work, circular references, pecularities, discussions for various JVM impls...)?

[What I've found so far are separate articles devoted to various aspects but no weighty tome :). Some good materials for Hotspot implementation are here. ]

Thanks a lot for any advice you give.

Answer 1

This is highly vendor dependent and not necessarily shared.

HotSpot is open source and demonstrates directly how it is done. Jikes RVM is a JVM written in Java which might be easier to dive into. JamVM is a tiny JVM written in C which - due to its size - might also be easier to dive into.

Answer 2

HotSpot:

Virtual Machine Garbage Collection Tuning

The Garbage-First Garbage Collector (G1)

HotSpot Garbage Collection

IBM Metronome:

Overview (with informative links on the left sidebar)

Answer 3

Also, take a look at this: http://dave-robinson.net/tuning/jvm_details.html

Answer 4

I would suggest to go through the Java Virtual Machine specification.Following is the URL for the same :

http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jvms/second_edition/html/VMSpecTOC.doc.html

This gives you a good generic details about the java virtual machine.