One common theme I have seen is all the Big Data Java solutions using home-baked solutions for off-heap storage. This essentially is free-malloc for Java world

One common theme I have seen is all the Big Data Java solutions using home-baked solutions for off-heap storage. This essentially is free-malloc for Java world using sun.misc.Unsafe API. The problem is Java specs do not dictate native access besides JNI. One standard off-heap API, which provides all the goodies of native world and escapes GC will be a right step. It is upto the dev to choose which world the object lives.