Living with Garbage

Presented by Gregg Donovan, Senior Software Engineer, Etsy.com, Inc.

Understanding the impact of garbage collection, both at a single node and a cluster level, is key to developing high-performance, high-availability Solr and Lucene applications. After a brief overview of garbage collection theory, we will review the design and use of the various collectors in the JVM.

At a single-node level, we will explore GC monitoring -- how to understand GC logs, how to monitor what % of your Solr request time is spend on GC, how to use VisualGC, YourKit, and other tools, and what to log and monitor. We will review GC tuning and how to measure success.

At a cluster-level, we will review how to design for partial availability -- how to avoid sending requests to a GCing node and how to be resilient to mid-request GC pauses.For application development, we will review common memory leak scenarios in custom Solr and Lucene application code and how to detect them.