I don't think that you are wrong, most of the JVM users are not forced to look into how GC works unless they are exposed to extreme high scale and load like LinkedIN, Twitter, etc. It is not uncommon to roll with 6GB+ heap. GC gets in your way if this high scale meets with low latency requirements for p99 (and above) latency, again which these guys care about a lot.
I think the best approach to GC based memory management is what Erlang does, extremely limited scope, no global locking and tiny GC time. I am not entirely familiar how the OCaml VM works, just started to play with the environment. Also, my understanding is that OCaml is not for highly concurrent systems. Anyways it is kind of offtopic here.
The summarize:
- JVM GC details are extremely important for high throughput low latency systems at scale, as far as I know the G1 GC is used for predictable low latency compactions, and I can verify that with my experiments, having 10ms GC pauses
- I think the Erlang approach is superior to garbage collected systems, but it requires no shared memory across your threads (or in the Erlang case processes), so the GC scope is tiny (and few other niceties in BEAM)
I think the best approach to GC based memory management is what Erlang does, extremely limited scope, no global locking and tiny GC time. I am not entirely familiar how the OCaml VM works, just started to play with the environment. Also, my understanding is that OCaml is not for highly concurrent systems. Anyways it is kind of offtopic here.
The summarize:
- JVM GC details are extremely important for high throughput low latency systems at scale, as far as I know the G1 GC is used for predictable low latency compactions, and I can verify that with my experiments, having 10ms GC pauses
- I think the Erlang approach is superior to garbage collected systems, but it requires no shared memory across your threads (or in the Erlang case processes), so the GC scope is tiny (and few other niceties in BEAM)
More on Java G1: http://www.infoq.com/articles/G1-One-Garbage-Collector-To-Ru... More about Erlang's GC here: http://prog21.dadgum.com/16.html