[mst]

I've seen some slim running JVM stuff by developers who actually bothered to care about it - under 25Mb slim.

Yes, lots of Java apps basically go "lol .... KABOOM" if you give them less than half a gig of RAM to play around in, but IMO that's a tragedy of the commons like thing within the ecosystem where common approaches mean you end up with layer upon layer of libraries none of which thought -their- RAM use was particularly egregious.

At this point, it's not the runtime's fault (G1 is excellent), and while you could argue that the language design led developers to do things wrong I think it's more a culture phenomenom - I think I might consider blaming J2EE and its proponents rather than the language itself.

Of course, from a sysadmin point of view, the runtime+application combination's memory usage is what matters in practice, I'm just saying the reason why you find yourself staring at the screen thinking "wait, it's using how much?!" is more complicated than "Java's memory management stuff sucks"