[sheeshkebab]

Search (elastic/solr), Cassandra, presto, and most other java backend storage and data processing engines need 20+Gb (at least) to be mildly useful. It's not uncommong to go with 64gb+ heaps there too.

Microservices/API won't help with lowering these.

[osi]

yes, exactly this. and by having scalable GC algos so you don't need to do "off heap" tricks in java, things are much easier.