Garbage First in JDeveloper

At my current customer we work with VDI's: Virtual Desktop Images, that at several times a day very, very slow. Even so slow that it more or less stalls for a minute or two.

JDeveloper is not known as a Ferrari under the IDE's. One of the causes is that by default heap settings is very poor: 128M-800M. Especially when you use it in  SOA or BPM Quickstart then at startup it will need to grow several times. But very soon working in it you'll get out of memory errors.

Because of the VDI's I did several changes to try to improve performance.
Main thing is set Xms and Xmx both at 2048M. I haven't found needing more up to this day.

But I found using the Garbage First collector gives me a slightly better performance.

To set it, together with the heap, add/change the following options in the ide.conf in ${JDEV_HOME}\jdeveloper\ide\bin\:

# Set the default memory options for the Java VM which apply to both 32 and 64-bit VM's.
# These values can be overridden in the user .conf file, see the comment at the top of this file.
#AddVMOption  -Xms128M
#AddVMOption  -Xmx800M
AddVMOption  -Xms2048M
AddVMOption  -Xmx2048M
AddVMOption  -XX:+UseG1GC 
AddVMOption  -XX:MaxGCPauseMillis=200

Find more on the command line options in this G1GC tutorial.

You can also use the ParNew incombination with the ParOld or ConcMarkSeep collector, as suggested in this blog. But from Java9 onwards G1GC is the default, and I expect that it better fits the behavior of JDeveloper, as in SOASuite and OSB installations.