I think the perception of Java suffers a lot because it will consume all the RAM on your machine by default if you let it (but not immediately). It's a very poor default because even though there are technical arguments for doing that (goes faster), they aren't well known and people tend to assume "more memory usage == worse design".
There are a lot of myths about the JVM out there. We can see on this thread the idea that it takes 1.5 seconds to start being repeated multiple times, each time someone else points out that it's actually more like tens of milliseconds to start.
I second that. I have deployed a medium traffic web-server written in Scala backed by a postgresql DB on 128MB VPS, back in 2009!
> I think the perception of Java suffers a lot because it will consume all the RAM on your machine by default if you let it (but not immediately).
I don't think that is true. The default heap size for Oracle and OpenJDK VMs has been bounded as far as I remember. In fact, I would like it if the VM, by default, allowed the heap size to grow upto available RAM when GC pressure increases, but that doesn't seem to be the case as of now.
Edit: Did you mean non-heap VM arenas grow indefinitely? If so, I am not aware of them.
I wonder if Oracle documents are plain wrong for JDK 8 docs for maximum heap size[1]:
"Smaller of 1/4th of the physical memory or 1GB. Before Java SE 5.0, the default maximum heap size was 64MB. You can override this default using the -Xmx command-line option.
Also Oracle has chosen correct defaults because it took Java long time to shed its reputation of being dog slow and if they optimize for memory it will start looking worse in performance.
1. https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/guides/vm/gc...
I can get it to start around 30-50mb, but as soon as you hit it with traffic the memory usage jumps up.
