On Mon, 17 Oct 2011, Russell Coker wrote:

On Mon, 17 Oct 2011, Chris Samuel <chris@csamuel.org> wrote:

...

As for RAM - well Java is not known for its light memory limits, there's one Java code that's run at VLSCI that can fail if it gets less than 30GB or 60GB of RAM, but we believe that's because it's doing stupid things with its file IO. :-(

There are also Java implementations on smart cards with RAM measured in kilobytes.

The RAM use is determined by what the application does and also by the garbage collection system. Often people tune their JVM to not do GC very often to save CPU time at the cost of using more RAM.

One thing that's worth noting is that in many environments Java code is written by people who don't know much about how computers work at a low level (they are the people who can't write a C program that doesn't SEGV regularly), so they tend not to be efficient with memory use. I think that Java gets a bad reputation because of this.

Is it possible to write a java gui that feels snappy? I've never seen one, but it could be due to the widget set being extremely high on overhead, or it could be due to people trying to do too much work in a single threaded application without yielding to the GUI often enough. Any examples of java software that doesn't suck? -- Tim Connors