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Comment by cafxx | Hacker News Reader

Why not just allocating the blobs off-heap? (That is something you probably want to do anyway if it's cryptographic material, to avoid being at the mercy of the GC leaving copies around)

ByteBuffer.allocateDirect should do that IIRC. This allows you to use the standard ConcurrentHashMap while being able to get a stable pointer for use by the rust logic.

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I could use DirectByteBuffer instances as CHM values. But Java deallocates the backing memory of DirectByteBuffers during object finalization. If there is no on-heap memory pressure then there is no GC and thus no finalization. So it would leak offheap memory. I could also use Unsafe to hack into DirectByteBuffer and call the Cleaner explicitly. Many libraries do that anyway. But then I would still need some kind of reference counting to make sure I won't deallocate a buffer with active readers.

is there any regret from choosing Java for Db development and need to work around this and likely many other issues?

Or you could simply invoke a GC periodically (or every N times a key is removed from the map, or similar schemes).

Another simple way, if we don't like the idea of triggering GCs manually,is to allocate the same buffer both off-heap and on-heap: use the off-heap one for actual key storage, and the on-heap one just to generate heap memory pressure.

Is this the equivalent of directly asking the os for more pages, or does it work via some other heap-like mechanism that simply isn't garbage collected?

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