I'm looking for arguments as to how best to size the young generation (with respect to the old generation) in an environment where low latency is critical.

My own testing tends to show that latency is lowest when the young generation is fairly large (eg. -XX:NewRatio <3), however I cannot reconcile this with the intuition that the larger the young generation the more time it should take to garbage collect.

The application runs on linux, jdk 6 before update 14, i.e G1 not available.