Why not write a script that periodically takes a machine of the loadbalancer, forces a GC on each of the servers, and then adds it back again.
I think this would be a cleaner approach than changing the entire code base.
I think this would be a cleaner approach than changing the entire code base.
Hell, you could argue the "root cause" is the use of a garbage-collected environment in the first place. All popular GC implementations have latency issues like this. All of them. If you can't deal with occasional high latencies, you should identify that requirement before choosing Java or C#.
All the solutions provided are just patching around that issue. I don't see anything in the post that looks like a root cause, and the GP's post has the advantage of being much simpler to implement.
What would be more useful to them is to be able to provide either hints to the GC, or to actually have some control over memory management. That is, keep the application the same, but let it influence GC behavior. They're forced to go at it the other way: keep the GC the same, but change the application so what the GC does becomes the right thing.
they modify the code in ways that don't represent the semantics of the problem to work around a limitation of the implementation.
That is always true when you start optimizing for performance. And nick_craver explains why the proposed suggestion may be easier to say, but there are hidden complexities. Personally, once you start introducing external control to your application like that, alarm bells go off in my head.