I'm trying to understand What the concepts of young, old and permanent generations are in the Java heap terminology, and more specifically the interactions between the three generations.
My questions are:
- What is the young generation?
- What is the old generation?
- What is the permanent generation?
- How does the three generations interact/relate to each other?
Best Answer
This seems like a common misunderstanding. In Oracle's JVM, the permanent generation is not part of the heap. It's a separate space for class definitions and related data. In Java 6 and earlier, interned strings were also stored in the permanent generation. In Java 7, interned strings are stored in the main object heap.
Here is a good post on permanent generation.
I like the descriptions given for each space in Oracle's guide on JConsole:
Java uses generational garbage collection. This means that if you have an object foo (which is an instance of some class), the more garbage collection events it survives (if there are still references to it), the further it gets promoted. It starts in the young generation (which itself is divided into multiple spaces - Eden and Survivor) and would eventually end up in the tenured generation if it survived long enough.