In some cases, reducing the impact of high allocation rates can be as easy as increasing the size of the young generation. Doing so will not reduce the allocation rate itself, but will result in less frequent collections. The benefit of the approach kicks in when there will be only a few survivors every time. As the duration of a minor GC pause is impacted by the number of surviving objects, they will not noticeably increase here.

The result is visible when we run the very same demo application with increased heap size and, with it, the young generation size, by using the -Xmx64m parameter:

2.808: [GC (Allocation Failure) [PSYoungGen: 20512K->32K(20992K)], 0.0003748 secs]
2.831: [GC (Allocation Failure) [PSYoungGen: 20512K->32K(20992K)], 0.0004538 secs]
2.855: [GC (Allocation Failure) [PSYoungGen: 20512K->32K(20992K)], 0.0003355 secs]
2.879: [GC (Allocation Failure) [PSYoungGen: 20512K->32K(20992K)], 0.0005592 secs]

However, just throwing more memory at it is not always a viable solution. Equipped with the knowledge on allocation profilers from the previous chapter, we may find out where most of the garbage is produced. Specifically, in this case, 99% are Doubles that are created with the readSensor method. As a simple optimization, the object can be replaced with a primitive double, and the null can be replaced with Double.NaN. Since primitive values are not actually objects, no garbage is produced, and there is nothing to collect. Instead of allocating a new object on the heap, a field in an existing object is directly overwritten.

The simple change (diff) will, in the demo application, almost completely remove GC pauses. In some cases, the JVM may be clever enough to remove excessive allocations itself by using the escape analysis technique. To cut a long story short, the JIT compiler may in some cases prove that a created object never “escapes” the scope it is created in. In such cases, there is no actual need to allocate it on the heap and produce garbage this way, so the JIT compiler does just that: it eliminates the allocation. See this benchmark for an example.