4 ms·

Somewhat tangentially: I run a useful app, JBidWatch (a nice, free eBay "sniping"/monitoring tool) on my Windows XP desktop. I started it 1 week ago following

by cagey 17y ago

Somewhat tangentially: I run a useful app, JBidWatch (a nice, free eBay "sniping"/monitoring tool) on my Windows XP desktop. I started it 1 week ago following a reboot. One week later I noticed the PC's mem usage was nearing the amount of physical memory and investigated; one contributor turned out to be the JVM session running this app: according to Task Manager, this app (actively monitoring no items during the week) was consuming over 100M of memory. Now, I won't stop using it, because I'm not aware of a better tool, and restarting it is not particularly painful, and yes, it's likely this app wouldn't exist w/o the ease of programming offered by Java (though I would prefer a GUI-less version written in a language I am fluent in), but still: 100M of memory for a web-polling app that was essentially idling (from an end-user perspective)? I've observed that various JVM apps gravitate to these (to me) giant memory footprints over time; I assume it's "the nature of the beast", but I'm speaking as a programmer who has never written a line of Java. A sysadmin sitting in the next cube, responsible for various Java-based server apps, has simply agreed with me that this is what's expected from Java apps.

scumola 17y ago
See, another fine example of my point. Thanks for that.
codahale 17y ago
You know, you can set a maximum heap size for JVM processes. It defaults to 1/4th of the physical memory or 1GB, whichever is the smaller.
JoelPM 17y ago
This sounds like a memory leak (probably sticking items in a hashmap and never bothering to remove them), or nothing has forced a major GC. Java apps that grow in memory usage without bound aren't demonstrating problems with Java - they're demonstrating poor programming. JIT'ing and GC algorithm improvements over the past few years have invalidated a lot of the original complaints raised against Java.

by cagey 17y ago

scumola 17y ago

See, another fine example of my point. Thanks for that.

codahale 17y ago

You know, you can set a maximum heap size for JVM processes. It defaults to 1/4th of the physical memory or 1GB, whichever is the smaller.

JoelPM 17y ago

This sounds like a memory leak (probably sticking items in a hashmap and never bothering to remove them), or nothing has forced a major GC. Java apps that grow in memory usage without bound aren't demonstrating problems with Java - they're demonstrating poor programming. JIT'ing and GC algorithm improvements over the past few years have invalidated a lot of the original complaints raised against Java.