Are you sure? I've written small HTTP servers in Java that can happily run with a heap of 30-50mb or less. Runtime overheads add some on top of that, but not much.

I think the perception of Java suffers a lot because it will consume all the RAM on your machine by default if you let it (but not immediately). It's a very poor default because even though there are technical arguments for doing that (goes faster), they aren't well known and people tend to assume "more memory usage == worse design".

There are a lot of myths about the JVM out there. We can see on this thread the idea that it takes 1.5 seconds to start being repeated multiple times, each time someone else points out that it's actually more like tens of milliseconds to start.