Imagine that a software organization replaces its programmers with ones who don't know how to code, in order to calculate how long it will take for them to exhaust their funds and shut down. In this scenario, no new revenue is generated, while staff pay continues. In a similar manner, when you use the Epsilon garbage collector (GC), introduced in Java 11, the software application replaces its GC with Epsilon, which does not release memory—to calculate how long will it take for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) to exhaust all its memory and shut down.

Epsilon is a no-operation (no-op) GC—that is, it doesn't collect any garbage. It only handles the allocation of memory. When the available Java heap is exhausted, the JVM shuts down.

If this GC seems weird to you, think again. The Epsilon GC has been added as a benchmark to test applications for performance, memory usage, latency, and throughput improvements.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Why Epsilon is required
• Features of Epsilon
• Examples of working with Epsilon
• Epsilon use cases