From Java SE 6 HotSpot[tm] Virtual Machine Garbage Collection Tuning
the following
Excessive GC Time and OutOfMemoryError
The concurrent collector will throw an OutOfMemoryError if too much time is being spent in garbage collection: if more than 98% of the total time is spent in garbage collection and less than 2% of the heap is recovered, an OutOfMemoryError will be thrown. This feature is designed to prevent applications from running for an extended period of time while making little or no progress because the heap is too small. If necessary, this feature can be disabled by adding the option -XX:-UseGCOverheadLimit to the command line.
The policy is the same as that in the parallel collector, except that time spent performing concurrent collections is not counted toward the 98% time limit. In other words, only collections performed while the application is stopped count toward excessive GC time. Such collections are typically due to a concurrent mode failure or an explicit collection request (e.g., a call to System.gc()).
in conjunction with a passage further down
One of the most commonly encountered uses of explicit garbage collection occurs with RMIs distributed garbage collection (DGC). Applications using RMI refer to objects in other virtual machines. Garbage cannot be collected in these distributed applications without occasionally collection the local heap, so RMI forces full collections periodically. The frequency of these collections can be controlled with properties. For example,
java -Dsun.rmi.dgc.client.gcInterval=3600000
-Dsun.rmi.dgc.server.gcInterval=3600000specifies explicit collection once per hour instead of the default rate of once per minute. However, this may also cause some objects to take much longer to be reclaimed. These properties can be set as high as Long.MAX_VALUE to make the time between explicit collections effectively infinite, if there is no desire for an upper bound on the timeliness of DGC activity.
Seems to imply that the evaluation period for determining the 98% is one minute long, but it might be configurable on Sun's JVM with the correct define.
Of course, other interpretations are possible.