In preperation for the Fall 2006 semester UW Madison was looking at ways to improve portal performance. The inital effort was focused at tuning the JVM heap for the way uPortal uses memory.
In preparation for the tuning and to understand the large number of options for the heap and garbage collectors the following white papers were reviewed:
http://java.sun.com/performance/reference/whitepapers/tuning.html
http://java.sun.com/docs/hotspot/gc5.0/gc_tuning_5.html
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/content/submitted/cms_gc_logs.html