100% true in my experience. Literally anything else is far better when it comes to bloat, including C#, RoR etc.

Increasing the Java heap size just makes it so that when garbage collection eventually hits, it causes an even more massive slowdown across the entire application.

In this case we don’t need to speculate at all. Signal is open source. Back when I was at Twilio we even did some at-scale experiments with running Signal. The intensive parts have absolutely nothing to do with Java because the server logic is relatively simple. The hard parts of Signal are the database storage/retrieval and the encryption.