Smaller young generations get collected more often, which means that objects will more quickly use up their 32 (by default) lives before being placed into into the tenured generation. Thus medium-lived objects tend to end up in the tenured generation. By keeping your young generation larger, you are more apt to "kill" medium-lived objects via a minor collections because there are fewer of them. In one test (on a real-world application, not on a test app) I saw the number of collections go from over 8000 to under 100 by right-sizing the young generation. The total time spent in GC was also drastically reduced from several minutes to under one minute. Both size and number of live objects are factors in GC time. Larger heaps take longer to collect. Given two heaps of the same size, the one with the most number of live objects takes the longest to collect. Parallel collection helps, given one CPU/core per thread. Fortunately, parallel collection is turned on by default starting with JVM 1.5 if you have two CPUs/cores and at least 1GB or RAM (yes RAM, not heap size). View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4172349#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...