Java 11 includes a lot of improvements and changes in the GC domain. With Z Garbage Collector (ZGC), Java is bringing another GC for you—scalable, with low latency. It is a completely new GC, written from scratch. It can work with heap memory, ranging from KBs to a large TB memory. As a concurrent garbage collector, ZGC promises not to exceed application latency by 10 milliseconds, even for bigger heap sizes. It is also easy to tune.

It was released with Java 11 as an experimental GC. Work is in progress on this GC in OpenJDK and you can expect more changes to it over time.

In this chapter, we'll cover the following topics:

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