GC, JIT and Warmup: The JVM’s Role in Flink at Scale

The JVM plays a critical but often overlooked role in the performance of Apache Flink applications. In this talk, we’ll examine how core JVM mechanisms - garbage collection (GC), Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation, and warmup behavior - can introduce latency, affect throughput, and lead to unpredictable performance in long-running Flink jobs.

We’ll break down the impact of GC algorithms on streaming workloads, explore how JIT optimizations can cause performance shifts during job execution, and explain why the warmup phase matters and what can be done about it.

We'll be correlating performance charts and GC and compilation logs leaving the attendees with a deeper understanding of how the JVM interacts with Flink's runtime.