Investigating the Effect of Garbage Collection on Service Level Objectives of Clouds

Platform as a Service (PaaS) clouds abstract large parts of the hardware/software stack to its tenant clients and provide it as a service. In this paper, we highlight the lack of scientific literature on the problem of Service Level Objective (SLO) satisfaction effects on clouds due to Garbage Collection (GC). To this end, we propose and implement CloudGC, a configurable PaaS application framework that aims in stressing the GC component of the underlying runtime. We use our CloudGC to experimentally evaluate the performance of the four GC policies (Gencon, Balanced, Optavgpause and Optthroughput) available in the IBM J9 Java Runtime, running on top of a local and isolated installation of the PaaS software Cloud Foundry.