Book Image

Java Memory Management

By : Maaike van Putten, Dr. Seán Kennedy
Book Image

Java Memory Management

By: Maaike van Putten, Dr. Seán Kennedy

Overview of this book

Understanding how Java organizes memory is important for every Java professional, but this particular topic is a common knowledge gap for many software professionals. Having in-depth knowledge of memory functioning and management is incredibly useful in writing and analyzing code, as well as debugging memory problems. In fact, it can be just the knowledge you need to level up your skills and career. In this book, you’ll start by working through the basics of Java memory. After that, you’ll dive into the different segments individually. You’ll explore the stack, the heap, and the Metaspace. Next, you’ll be ready to delve into JVM standard garbage collectors. The book will also show you how to tune, monitor and profile JVM memory management. Later chapters will guide you on how to avoid and spot memory leaks. By the end of this book, you’ll have understood how Java manages memory and how to customize it for the benefit of your applications.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Understanding computer memory and Java memory

First things first – running applications, Java or not, requires computer memory. The application’s memory is the physical memory of the computer. Having more knowledge about the memory of the computer is going to help in our understanding of Java memory. Therefore, let’s discuss the concept of memory and Java memory in a bit more detail.

Computer memory

Chances are that you already know this, but just to reiterate: a computer has memory. This is the part of the computer that is used for storing information that is used for executing processes. We also call this the main memory or sometimes primary storage. An important point to make here is that this is different from computer storage, where long-term information is stored. This storage is long-term because the HDD storage stores the information magnetically and the SDD can be qualified as Electrically Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory (EEPROM). They don...