This article compares the Garbage Collection (GC) performance of OpenJDK and GraalVM. GraalVM's concurrent, generational collector outperforms OpenJDK by exhibiting higher throughput (99.947%) and lower average pause times (450 ms vs. 2.5 secs). It concludes that GraalVM's GC mechanism is more efficient in managing memory, benefiting application performance.
Throughput measures productive work done by an application over time, distinguishing it from non-productive tasks such as garbage collection (GC). If 2 minutes out of 60 minutes are spent on GC, throughput drops to 96.67%. Poor throughput can result from long GC pauses, memory leaks, consecutive full GCs, or resource contention.