[lmm]

> I know that the JVM is a modern marvel of software engineering, so I'm always surprised when my Erlang apps consume less than 10MB of RAM, start up nearly instantaneously, respond to HTTP requests in less than 10ms and run forever, while my Java apps take 2 minutes to start up, have several hundred millisecond HTTP response latency and horde memory.

That's not the platform's problem, you're doing something wrong. I run my web services on Spray[1] and they start in maybe 10s, average HTTP request latency is 4ms, and they run forever at ~100-200MB RAM. That's without putting any effort into tuning.

[1] now replaced by akka-http but I haven't ported yet, and it works