This is my experience as well... [LWN.net]

This is my experience as well...

Posted Aug 24, 2011 9:00 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: And THAT is the problem by alankila
Parent article: HP dropping webOS devices

This sort of application should have its heap size tuned appropriately because too large heap will have lot of objects to collect when the cycle triggers, and this in turn can cause glitches, whereas a small heap will have frequent but fast enough collections.

Yeah. It works. But the main stated goal of the GC, it's raison d'être is the ability to forget about memory allocation. Remember: no memory leaks, no more confusion about ownership, etc? GC pseudoscience fails to deliver, sorry. Just like relational database theory fails to deliver. It does not mean both are useless - if your goal is "something working" they often are "good enough". But the problem with Java is the fact that GC is imposed. You can not avoid it because standard library requires it. So in the end you fight to the death with the one thing which should "free you" from some imaginary tyranny.

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This is my experience as well...

Posted Aug 25, 2011 10:37 UTC (Thu) by alankila (subscriber, #47141) [Link]

Your arguments sound really bizarre to me.

Think about what I just said: I have positive experience working with a relatively low-latency application in the real world. To get it, all I have to do is adjust one tunable -- the heap size. And I hinted that with G1GC even that adjustment is now unnecessary, but I'll wait until G1GC is actually the default. JDK7 maybe, when it rolls out for OS X I'll probably check it out.

This is my experience as well...

Posted Aug 31, 2011 14:37 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

So rather than agonizing over object ownership, we tweak one tunable, the heap size, yet the existence of this single tunable apparently makes GCs 'pseudoscience'?

Hint: GCs are actually studied, quite intensively, by actual computer scientists. Science is what scientists do: thus, GC research is science. Enough of the badmouthing. (It is quite evident to me at least that no amount of evidence will change your opinion on this score: further discussion is clearly pointless.)