JavaOne 2026 Session

Summary

ZGC has evolved over the past decade from an experimental feature in JDK 11 to a robust, production-ready garbage collector powering critical online services worldwide.

ZGC is a concurrent garbage collector, meaning all heavy GC tasks are performed alongside application threads, resulting in sub-millisecond pause times. This makes ZGC a suitable garbage collector for applications where short response times are important. This talk will explore:

• A brief history of ZGC
• Its internal mechanisms
• The performance in JDK 25
• Future development plans