One of the features that resulted in the rise of Java in the early days was its automatic memory management with its GCs, which freed developers from manual memory management and lowered memory leaks.

However, with unpredictable timings and durations, garbage collection can (at times) do more harm to an application than good. Increased latency directly affects the throughput and performance of an application. With eve-decreasing hardware costs and programs engineered to use largish memories, applications are demanding lower latency and higher throughput from garbage collectors.

ZGC promises a latency of no more than 10 milliseconds, which doesn't increase with heap size or a live set. This is because its stop-the-world pauses are limited to root scanning.