alt Hacker NewsIf you are severely I/O bound it isn't intrinsic, it means your server is badly under-provisioned in the I/O department. Linux on a modern server can push 200 GB/s of I/O. Even if web services were engineered to a standard that could consume that much I/O, which they are not, you would have to be astonishingly wasteful to burn it all.
It is rare to be severely I/O bound because software engineered for I/O performance tends to run out of memory bandwidth first.
Games are not throughput-optimized systems in any conventional sense. They are a canonical example of latency-optimized systems.
I have nothing against GCs, I use them regularly even in performance-sensitive contexts. But too many people understate the adverse impact of GCs on performance contrary to evidence and theory.
I/O bound means waiting on I/O, which isn’t necessarily because it is slow, but because it is simply waiting on data to arrive, like a web service most of its idle time. If your client is dozens of milliseconds away, a GC pause is pretty much invisible, unless you are trying to squeeze every last request/second from a machine (instead of simply scaling horizontally)
That said, from your profile, you seem to work on a very sensitive niche that might colour your opinion, with good reason. What I am claiming is most of us are not building such strict a system.
Even in my toy hobby of OS development a GC isn’t the end of the world unless your goal is to compete with, say, Linux in a some kind of performance challenge, where in that case memory allocation might be the least of your bottlenecks.