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Almost anything would be better than the Ruby runtime, which is notoriously bad. JVM performs best with largish heaps (>512Mi) - if your services fit into that model, it's a great piece of technology that is very fast.

But I have to agree w/ others that after using golang, where an equivalent web app would run in <50Mi of RAM with far better tail latencies, the memory cost of the JVM feels very large.

Same with Twitter. Remember the Fail Whale? Those were the non-jvm days before they ran ruby on the jvm.

> Apparently, Square was first built out on Ruby with the mindset that the JVM is an old clunker

Ah yes, this would be the same industry where people lead their teams to switch from Java to Go because they believe it will improve the productivity of development.

If one doesn't switch technologies to improve the efficacy of their team, why ever switch technologies? Should we simply use the first technologies conceived until the end of time?