I think basically the argument is that by setting the min bound lower, you allow the JVM to shrink the heap. This could maybe be beneficial towards reducing pause time because the JVM has less memory to manage overall. That being said, that SO answer also mentions:
> Sometimes this behavior doesn't give you the performance benefits you'd expect and in those cases it's best to set mx == ms.
I've also seen apps configured this way professionally for similar reasons. You might imagine some app that leads to the JVM pathologically trimming the heap in a way that isn't desirable and thus impacts performance in some subtle way, etc. The answer with a lot of this stuff is usually try both ways, measure, see if you can observe a meaningful difference for your apps/workload for typical/peak traffic.
Background: I've worked on Java apps for a few years at reasonable scale and worked on GC pressure issues in that time.
I think basically the argument is that by setting the min bound lower, you allow the JVM to shrink the heap. This could maybe be beneficial towards reducing pause time because the JVM has less memory to manage overall. That being said, that SO answer also mentions:
> Sometimes this behavior doesn't give you the performance benefits you'd expect and in those cases it's best to set mx == ms.
I've also seen apps configured this way professionally for similar reasons. You might imagine some app that leads to the JVM pathologically trimming the heap in a way that isn't desirable and thus impacts performance in some subtle way, etc. The answer with a lot of this stuff is usually try both ways, measure, see if you can observe a meaningful difference for your apps/workload for typical/peak traffic.
Background: I've worked on Java apps for a few years at reasonable scale and worked on GC pressure issues in that time.