A major insurance company improved application performance by tuning Garbage Collection (GC). They identified consecutive Full GC events as the bottleneck and explored three solutions. By increasing the heap size and adjusting GC settings, they significantly enhanced GC efficiency, resulting in a 23% increase in application throughput, a 15% reduction in response time, and a 50% decrease in CPU usage.
Prabhakar Jonnalagadda, a performance architect at Oracle, tackled an application's frequent crashes and poor performance by analyzing its GC log with GCeasy and optimizing JVM arguments. He emphasizes that tuning options are case-specific and encourages engineers to explore and adapt solutions, as there is no universal fix for performance issues.
The decision to use few large memory instances versus many small memory instances lacks a definitive answer, as evidenced by two successful technology companies adopting opposite strategies. Both approaches can work if backed by a competent team. However, large memory configurations are typically more expensive and can complicate performance troubleshooting.