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OP here. The overhead is really dependent on your process overhead. I typically use it for Python/Ruby/C apps which are relatively lightweight compared to something JVM based.

The runtime profile of WebSockets tends to be different to typical HTTP requests too. With typical HTTP you're often optimizing for 1000s of short requests per second, whereas with WebSockets the requests are much longer lived.

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The JVM is optimized for long-running processes as it takes time for the JIT to kick in. Other than the memory footprint your code gets quite a performance boost; I'm always surprised how much of a difference it makes before and after.

You wouldn't want to boot a JVM process per connection but rather implement the listening socket yourself and dispatch connections within that same process with all of the required services already initialized. A WebSocket server is no different.

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