The previous article in this series, Metaspace Architecture purposely left out the Compressed Class Space. That one further complicates the picture.

Lets talk about it.

We dive into the architecture of Metaspace. We describe the various layers and components and how they work together.

This will be mainly interesting to folks who either want to hack hotspot and the Metaspace or at least really understand where that memory goes and why we could not just use malloc.

The OpenJDK uses Metaspace to store its class metadata. It can contribute a large part to the non-Java-heap memory footprint of a Java VM process.

We explain what it is and why we need it. A short, quick and hopefully easy read without diving too deep into VM internals. Should be digestible by everyone.