Hi Harsh,

To measure the performance of garbage collection we simply enable garbage collection logging.
This is done by adding the following JVM options to the CATALINA_OPTS variable in the bin/setenv.sh|bat file for your Tomcat instance.

-Xloggc:$CATALINA_HOME/logs/gc.log or Xloggc:%CATALINA_HOME%/logs/gc.log

-XX:+PrintHeapAtGC

-XX:+PrintGCDetails

-XX:+PrintGCTimeStamps

-XX:-HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError

Once these options are added and Tomcat is restarted, you should see a file logs/gc.log which will contain logging statements from the garbage collector. In that log file, you should see lines telling you when garbage collection has run and if it was full garbage collection. Some examples:

Partial garbage collection:

1.612: [GC [PSYoungGen: 12998K->1568K(18496K)] 12998K->1568K(60864K),0.0054130 secs] [Times: user=0.01 sys=0.00, real=0.00 secs]

Full garbage collection:

1.617: [Full GC (System) [PSYoungGen: 1568K->0K(18496K)] [PSOldGen: 0K->1483K(42368K)] 1568K->1483K(60864K) [PSPermGen: 9458K->9458K(21248K)],0.0294590 secs] [Times: user=0.02 sys=0.00, real=0.03 secs]

Continue to adjust your configuration or application to reach the goal of both a minimal number of garbage collections and a minimal amount of time spent on garbage collections. 

Reference : http://www.theserverside.com/discussions/thread/63241.html

Thanks,
Ujjwal