[hrjet]

> I've written small HTTP servers in Java that can happily run with a heap of 30-50mb or less. Runtime overheads add some on top of that, but not much.

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.

[geodel]

Must be Java 6 in 2009. Java memory usage increased with new releases to make it perform better. For medium traffic site it would have worked fine because GC would have ample time to clean unused objects.

[jshen]

128mb is a lot compared to go which will often run around 10mb. Was your jvm back then 32mb or 64mb? If it was 32 your memory requirement will be higher on 64.

[hrjet]

128MB was the total RAM in the VPS including OS + nginx + JVM + Postgresql. The heap allocated to the JVM process was about 64MB, but bear in mind that this was an actual application. So, it's hard to do a detailed comparison between JVM and Go without standardising on the application. All that I am claiming is that JVM is in the same ball park.

[jshen]

It's not in the same ballpark. I'll throw some code up when I get a chance.

Edit: do you have a twitter or Reddit account? I'll ping you when I have code examples if you want.