Minor, Major and Full GC - optimizing

General thinking suggests that: * Minor GC cleans Young generation; * Major GC cleans Tenured space; * Full GC cleans all heap.

However, while we can certainly state that Minor GC cleans Young generation it’s a bit more difficult to differentiate Major and Full GC, especially considering that Major GC can be quite often triggered by Minor GC and some garbage collectors can perform cleaning concurrently. Instead of focusing of distinguishing phases one should pay closer attention to actual operations of Garbage Collector itself - uncommenting the line GC_DEBUG=" -XX:+PrintTenuringDistribution -XX:+PrintGCDetails -XX:+PrintGCDateStamps -XX:+PrintGCTimeStamps -Xloggc:logs/jvm.log -verbose:gc " in etc/tigase.conf (or adding same properties to the java commandline) and subsequently analyzing the results should prove more helpful. In addition monitoring GC operation using for example VisualVM (with VisualGC plugin) will also be helpful.