A method and computer program product for garbage collection sensitive load balancing is disclosed for memory tuning for garbage collection and CPU utilization optimization An application is benchmarked across multiple different heap sizes to accumulate garbage collection metrics and the garbage collection metrics accumulated during benchmarking are utilized to compute both CPU utilization and garbage collection time for each of a selection of candidate heap sizes. One of the candidate heap sizes can be matched to a desired CPU utilization and garbage collection time, and the matched one of the candidate heap sizes can be applied to a host environment.