[nvarsj]

I'm not sure it's trivial. Tuning the JVM is an entire cottage industry. JVM performance experts can make 1000+/day tuning the JVM and are in high demand. Companies spend huge amounts of engineering effort to keep the JVM running smoothly. I used to be involved in this side of things pretty heavily at a HFT firm, which almost exclusively used Java.

In my opinion it's a colossal waste of resources. Classic example of using the wrong tool for the job.

[koffiezet]

And it's still cheaper to hire a guy with a skill like that for a few weeks, or even keep him permanently - and keep a larger development team of cheaper C# or Java devs, than it is to replace them all with higher-payed C/C++ devs which would probably take longer to get the same functionality up & running.