My friend, and genius Java GC expert at Oracle, Tony Printezis is giving a talk on Java GC and HotSpot tuning at JavaOne. His talk will be on Thursday, where he'll discuss this topic, as well as work being done to improve Java GC for low-latency collection, even with very large heaps.

He will also talk about what he calls " The Eight Myths about Garbage Collection":

1-Reference counting GC will solve all my latency problems. 2-Malloc/free will always perform better than GC. 3-Finalizers should be called promptly, as soon as objects become unreachable. 4-Garbage collection will eliminate all memory leaks. 5-Life would be so much better if I could explicitly deallocate some important objects, since I know when they're unreachable. 6-I can get a GC that delivers both very high throughput and very low latency. 7-I need to disable GC in critical sections of my code. 8-Anything I can write in a system with GC, I can write with malloc/free.