This paper explores automatic heap sizing where developers let the frequency of GC expressed as a target overhead of the application's CPU utilisation, control the size of the heap, as opposed to the other way around. Given enough headroom and spare CPU, a concurrent garbage collector should be able to keep up with the application's allocation rate, and neither the frequency nor duration of GC should impact throughput and latency. Because of the inverse relationship between time spent performing garbage collection and the minimal size of the heap, this enables trading memory for computation and conversely, neutral to an application's performance.

Sustainable computing needs energy-efficient software. This paper explores the potential of leveraging the nature of software written in managed languages: increasing energy efficiency by changing a program’s memory management strategy without altering a single line of code. To this end, we perform comprehensive energy profiling of 35 Java applications across four benchmarks. In many cases, we find that it is possible to save energy by replacing the default G1 collector with another without sacrificing performance. Furthermore, potential energy savings can be even higher if performance regressions are permitted. Inspired by these results, we study what the most energy-efficient GCs are to help developers prune the search space for energy profiling at a low cost. Finally, we show that machine learning can be successfully applied to the problem of finding an energy-efficient GC configuration for an application, reducing the cost even further.