One of my favorite interview questions on Garbage collection, just to check whether the candidate has ever monitored GC activities or not. You can monitor garbage collection activities either offline or real-time. You can use tools like JConsole and VisualVM VM with its Visual GC plug-in to monitor real time garbage collection activities and memory status of JVM or you can redirect Garbage collection output to a log file for offline analysis by using -XlogGC=<PATH> JVM parameter. Anyway you should always enable GC options like -XX:PrintGCDetails -X:verboseGC and -XX:PrintGCTimeStamps as it doesn't impact application performance much but provide useful states for performance monitoring.
