Next to the Eden space reside two Survivor spaces called from and to. It is important to notice that one of the two Survivor spaces is always empty.

The empty Survivor space will start having residents next time the Young generation gets collected. All of the live objects from the whole of the Young generation (that includes both the Eden space and the non-empty ‘from’ Survivor space) are copied to the ‘to’ survivor space. After this process has completed, ‘to’ now contains objects and ‘from’ does not. Their roles are switched at this time.

This process of copying the live objects between the two Survivor spaces is repeated several times until some objects are considered to have matured and are ‘old enough’. Remember that, based on the generational hypothesis, objects which have survived for some time are expected to continue to be used for very long time.

Such ‘tenured’ objects can thus be promoted to the Old Generation. When this happens, objects are not moved from one survivor space to another but instead to the Old space, where they will reside until they become unreachable.

To determine whether the object is ‘old enough’ to be considered ready for propagation to Old space, GC tracks the number of collections a particular object has survived. After each generation of objects finishes with a GC, those still alive have their age incremented. Whenever the age exceeds a certain tenuring threshold the object will be promoted to Old space.

The actual tenuring threshold is dynamically adjusted by the JVM, but specifying -XX:+MaxTenuringThreshold sets an upper limit on it. Setting -XX:+MaxTenuringThreshold=0 results in immediate promotion without copying it between Survivor spaces. By default, this threshold on modern JVMs is set to 15 GC cycles. This is also the maximum value in HotSpot.

Promotion may also happen prematurely if the size of the Survivor space is not enough to hold all of the live objects in the Young generation.