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> That critic would be manifesting his ignorance, because there is absolutely nothing to gain by lowering the memory budget.

Given that compute is often priced proportional to (maximum) memory usage, there is potentially a lot to be gained: dramatically cheaper hosting costs. Of course if your hosting costs are small to be begin with then this likely isn't worthwhile.




> Given that compute is often priced proportional to (maximum) memory usage, (...)

Let's look at numbers.

Hetzner sells vCPUs with 4GB of RAM for less than 5$/month, and 8GB of RAM for less than $10/month.

https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/

In my example, the cost of having garbage collection generation 0 events triggering twice a year would be an extra $5. If I wanted the frequency of these events to double, in theory I would save perhaps $2/month.

If I ran a web-scale service with 10 times the nodes as-is, we're talking about a $50/month price tag difference.

How much does a company charge for an engineer's hourly labor? How many years would it take to recover the cost of having an engineer tune a service's garbage collection strategy?

People need to thing things through before discussing technical merits.




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