Oh man, GC is amazingly nice but when it fails sure does it fail. It also typically fails when your biggest task is reducing overall resource spend, or getting that extra 9 after 3+ 9s of latency reduced.

On multiple teams of FAANG engineers, Ive seen the GC be a big part of some meltdown and none of us knew a good way around it. Tuning only goes so far. Otherwise, you just have to give it more memory and CPUs (horizontally or vertically).

Almost always the answer was, this might need to be reworked in C++ entirely or JNI. In same cases it even got funded and was a tremendous success (like 10x fewer resources). However, then you’re dealing with C++ and all of its issues.

I’m looking forward to more value types in Java but managing the heap will always be a bottleneck eventually.