Programmatic notification of JVM's GC events

Question

I would like to track how much time is spent in GC and how much memory has been collected, but not by analysing GC logs (ie. analyzing what I got from -XX:+PrintGCWhatever).

I found that I can use Sun's ManagementFactory to get a GarbageCollectorMXBean that can give me some GCInfo object containing memory information but I have no guarantee I can collect all GC through this mean.

Does anybody know of a way to do this in code?

Answer 1

GarbageCollectorMXBean is the best I've been able to find on the Sun JVM. In my experience, it actually comes pretty close to what you're asking for.

I imagine you could have a dedicated thread that would wake up from time to time to get the GC stats. This would add some determinism to when the stats are collected.