Or you can just use a more memory efficient language like Java. Python and JS use tons of memory compared to strongly typed VM languages like C#, Go, Java. People lament Java memory usage but Python/Node use several times more
The people who lament Java's memory usage never complain about Python or Ruby because... if you're worried about the JVM you would never consider Python!
In my experience many dev think the scripting language heritage means these languages have smaller/lighter runtimes
Sure, memory consumption and CPU perf are both pretty bad in Python, but latency and memory footprint of the runtime itself are pretty good, so it’s ideal for tooling, crons, lambdas etc. JVM is comparatively efficient once you have the JVM ready, but that sure takes tons of resources.
I’m hoping Graal changes this. I don’t like JVM-based languages, but I do like technological progress.
- https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2014-May/134528...
- https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2018-May/153296...
If your script is expected to be run interactively on a frequent basis, then Go, Rust, C++, or even Bash (for simple stuff) will give you much lower user-perceived latency than Python.
JVM starts really quick (~100ms on my machine) and doesn't use much resources as long as your app is small. that's... Uncommon in Java land though. Even simply apps pull in Guava/Apache Commons and a few client libraries. This can easily be thousands of classes. Nobody thinks about it because runtime cost for loading shitloads of code is so low. But you can improve this a ton by using ProGaurd and stripping out stuff you don't need
If I can do it in numpy, I can probably get a lighter, faster implementation with Python than in Java. More generally, if I can do it with a Python package that's actually a fairly thin wrapper around a C, C++ or Fortran library, then Python also has a decent chance of being the easy winner.
If none of those situations apply, then yeah, typically Java ends up being more efficient.
(I've never successfully used Node so I have no idea what that's like in memory use.)