Looking at the JVM source for 1.5.0_10, it would appear that this option is used only by the ParallelScavange collector, and is used only for major collections. There is a separate option, MaxGCMinorPauseMillis, that is used ofr the minor collections. In JDK 7 (b-53, 02Apr09), the MaxGCPauseMillis is also applied to the CMS collector (which is major collection only). View the original post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4224941#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...