The marketing blurb: The Z Garbage Collector (ZGC) is a scalable low latency garbage collector. ZGC performs all expensive work concurrently, without stopping the execution of application threads for more than a millisecond. It is suitable for applications which require low latency. Pause times are independent of the heap size that is being used. ZGC works well with heap sizes from a few hundred megabytes to 16TB. It's not available on Solaris/illumos by default, but there's an experimental patch here that will enable it. To do that, go to the root of the source tree after unpacking and applying all the other patches, and apply with gpatch -p1 < .../illumos-zgc.patch This patch does 2 things: 1. Patches make/autoconf/jvm-features.m4 to add solaris (just x86) to the platforms that zgc will be built on. 2. Adds a basic implementation of support for zgc under the src/hotspot/os/solaris/gc directory. The support files are a mishmash of the bsd and linux implementations. Mostly the simple bsd skeleton, with mmap() instead of the bsd mremap(), using MAP_ANONYMOUS to simply get an anonymous mapping. It can be enabled via the flag java -XX:+UseZGC ... Initial testing indicates that it does work, although some crashes have been seen.