The serial collector uses a single thread to perform all garbage collection work, which makes it relatively efficient because there is no communication overhead between threads. It is best-suited to single processor machines, because it cannot take advantage of multiprocessor hardware, although it can be useful on multiprocessors for applications with small data sets (up to approximately 100 MB). The serial collector is selected by default on certain hardware and operating system configurations, or can be explicitly enabled with the option -XX:+UseSerialGC.