Different GC algorithms (serial / parallel / concorrent-mark-sweep) are discussed here, as well as how to use Java VM options for chosing among them.
And if you pass
-Xloggc:[file] -XX:+PrintGCDetails -XX:+PrintGCDateStamp
to your VM, you can feed the resulting GC logfile to a tool like GCViewer (for support for the latest VM versions, use GCViewer from GitHub), and create results like this:
