The Planetarium

Just a note to clarify the terms of using the Garbage First collector in Java SE 6u14. Right now, because its still new-ish and not thoroughly battle tested, its turned off by default and intended for use to evaluate it. As you know, many people already have been doing so. Here's the command line option to turn it on:

   -XX:+UnlockExperimentalVMOptions -XX:+UseG1GC

Once the team has ironed out all the kinks (and please, let them know if you find any !), it will be ready for primetime, and will be in JDK7, where it will be available for free, no strings, under the usual terms as part of the JDK.

The Janitor is told that an earlier version of the release notes implied that you had to have a support contract to use G1. Some certainly ran with that ball and even made a topical story out of it !

Our bad. So we made the notes clearer, because you don't need to do anything special to try it out. Unless you want your kinks fixed before everyone else gets the fixes either in the next update or in JDK 7. In which case, there is nice little program waiting just for you :)