Upgrading to JDK 21 and Adopting Generational ZGC: Motivation, Design, Implementation, Monitoring, and Performance Evaluation
This article explains why the backend services were upgraded from JDK 8 to JDK 21, introduces the generational ZGC garbage collector, details its architecture, tuning parameters, integration steps, monitoring setup, and presents performance test results that demonstrate reduced allocation stalls, lower latency, higher throughput, and near‑zero GC pauses.