At GridGain, having worked on a distributed caching (data grid) product for many years, we constantly benchmark with various Garbage Collectors to find the optimal configuration for larger heap sizes. From conducting numerous tests, we have concluded that unless you are utilizing some off-heap technology (e.g. GridGain OffHeap), no Garbage Collector provided with JDK will render any kind of stable GC performance with heap sizes larger that 16GB.