Well it depends a bit, in my low latency application where we cant afford GC pauses, we tolerate them from 5am to 5:30 am. We do everything preallocated and if we must tolerate new heap allocation we simply never release (so we have a lot of object pools).

I felt it was hard and exotic at first but now I feel it's quite logical: never free, and have a proper monitoring of your size per unit of information to size the heap right and you're done.

But then it also depends why you dont want GC, us it's because clients cannot tolerate a pause (we had a socket manager creating and releasing garbage that triggered one 50ms GC pause during the last 3 seconds of trading of a particularly crazy trading day and the client threatened to leave), but often they re tolerable if you just stay reasonable with your garbage.

The problem is not the collection in non critical applications, it's the garbage generation getting completely out of hand. In a C# application my team had to micro optimize because of covid-related explosive trading volume, we simply bought gigantic amount of RAM for our 200 users, only allowed GC if CPU was in low usage and run with 80GB memory usage at the end of the day for an order grid that could run with 5GB collected. That s another way: I wish Java 8 had an easier way to simply deactivate GC for us to run with hardware money.