Demystifying JVM Garbage Collection

Most of us don’t want to go back to the days of `malloc` and `free`. However, the magic of garbage collectors—while convenient—can often feel mysterious and difficult to understand.
In this talk, you’ll learn about the many different garbage collectors available in JVMs, along with the strengths and weaknesses of the allocation and collection strategies used by each. We’ll also explore how garbage collectors continue to evolve to support modern hardware and cloud environments.
The session will cover core garbage collection concepts such as object reachability, concurrent collectors, parallel garbage collectors, and generational garbage collectors. These ideas will be explored by following the progression and evolution of garbage collectors in the HotSpot JVM.

Speaker:
Douglas Hawkins has been passionately developing software for over 20 years.
Throughout his career, Doug has focused on building high-performance Java applications, with experience spanning domains from bioinformatics to financial exchanges.
After a decade as a Java developer, Doug transitioned to working on the Java Virtual Machine at Azul Systems, deepening his expertise in JVM internals and performance engineering.
Today, Doug continues his work on performance tooling for developers as part of Datadog’s Java Application Performance Monitoring team.
While Doug remains passionate about developing software, his true passion is sharing knowledge—especially helping others understand low-level JVM details and performance tuning.
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