Garbage Collection Pause

Definitions

1. A stop-the-world event where a garbage collector pauses all application threads to reclaim memory. Can range from microseconds (ZGC, Shenandoah) to seconds (old CMS collector on large heaps). The primary cause of tail latency spikes in JVM and .NET applications. Tuning GC is a specialized skill in performance engineering.

   In plain English: When a program briefly freezes because the runtime is cleaning up unused memory — a common source of slowness in Java apps.

   Example: "The p99 latency spike to 3 seconds is a GC pause — switch from G1 to ZGC for sub-millisecond pauses on that 64GB heap."

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