WORK AROUND
Use -Xmx1G on the command line to get the same default heap size as jdk7 b19 and earlier.
15-01-2008
EVALUATION
The root cause is the same as 6630863: the parallel compacting collector cannot (yet)
compact just part of eden into the old gen; either everything from eden must fit or
nothing can be moved. This has been aggravated in jdk7 b20 by
6581118: For GC ergonomics on 64b server-class machines, remove the 1G maximum on
default heap size.
So the default heap size for 64-bit parallel gc on the indicated test machine has gone from 1G to 7.7G, with a corresponding increase in GC times.