jdvh

I had almost exactly the same experience. Also a hard drive that was starting to die on us on a Sunday night and they had it replaced within the hour. We just had to reboot and start the raid mirror again. 6 minutes downtime in total.

Their customer support is terrific.

> just bumping a pointer

If only. You have to check for out-of-memory, and throw an exception if so. (This check can sometimes be optimized away, though). You also have to mark the size of the allocated block, so the garbage collector knows how many bytes to copy during the sweep phase.

Also, garbage collectors usually allocate from a shared memory pool, so every allocation also involves some mutex operations.

Allocation is bumping a pointer in theory only.