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To get to a low GC overhead in Java (and perhaps other languages too) you have to pay with an increase in memory consumption. Sometimes as much as 100% additional RAM to avoid frequent full GC scans.

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That's true, but malloc/free based systems also have a relatively high memory overhead due to fragmentation and programmers being worse at inserting frees than the GC. It's not at all clear that the C/C++ model of memory management has lower than 100% overhead for long running programs.

> but malloc/free based systems also have a relatively high memory overhead due to fragmentation

In case you haven't seen it, there's been some interesting progress on that front:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1UBJbfR-H0

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