In Java, the concurrent mode failure means that the concurrent collector failed to free up enough memory space form tenured and permanent gen and has to give up and let the full stop-the-world gc kicks in. The end result could be very expensive. I understand this concept but never had a good comprehensive understanding of A) what could cause a concurrent mode failure and B) what's the solution?. This sort of unclearness leads me to write/debug code without much of hints in mind and often has to shop around those performance flags from Foo to Bar without particular reasons, just have to try. I'd like to learn from developers here how your experience is. If you had previous encountered such performance issue, what was the cause and how you addressed it? If you have coding recommendations, please don't be too general. Thanks!