10 Essential JVM Options for a Java Production System

This is a brief guide of important JVM options which you will often see with production Java systems. As a Java developer, you should know what these JVM options means and their importance. You will find that most of the JVM options are related to heap memory settings, garbage collection and to log some details e.g. heap dump, necessary for troubleshooting any issue e.g. memory leak or excessive memory consumption. It's ok if you don't know them yet but you should know them and that's the objective of this article. How do you find the JVM options your application is using? Well, you can see the startup scripts through which your application is started. Alternatively, if your application is running on Linux you can do ps -ef | grep java to find the Java process and see the JVM options printed as process arguments. If more than one Java process is running on the system then you may need to search with a keyword which is unique to your Java application.

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