alt Hacker NewsThanks, that's a really good explanation. And makes sense, especially since Java objects are all constantly getting allocated/freed on the (virtual) heap rather than stack.
Thanks, that's a really good explanation. And makes sense, especially since Java objects are all constantly getting allocated/freed on the (virtual) heap rather than stack.
No problem.
The GC strategy for Java works best when the JVM has a lot of memory to play with. That's a big reason why a lot of companies use it for the backends.
However, Java suffers when you start talking about small heaps. This has become a much bigger issue as containered applications have risen as a primary deployment method. There are active efforts ongoing to solve this problem and make Java more friendly to smaller memory footprints and containers in general.
The Go/python/javascript strategies end up working better in those situations. They have very fast startups and pretty low memory requirements. However, when you start talking about apps that need a lot of memory, they both end up suffering as their allocation strategies degrade as the memory being tracked grows. Especially if there's a large amount of memory churn. The JVM has about the best strategy for very high memory churn.