Can you explain what ZGC is and what it is used for?

ZGC (Z Garbage Collector) is a low-latency garbage collector for the JVM, designed to minimize pause times during garbage collection, especially in applications with large memory heaps.

Main features of ZGC:

• Operates concurrently with the application, minimizing thread stops.
• Supports scaling up to terabytes of memory.
• Uses color marking of objects to track their state without long pauses.

The purpose of ZGC is to provide efficient memory management in Java applications with minimal impact on performance and responsiveness, which is particularly important for server and real-time systems.

Example of launching JVM with ZGC:

java -XX:+UseZGC -Xmx4g -jar app.jar

This allows ZGC to be used for garbage collection with a maximum heap size of 4 GB.