If you read the article (what a novel idea!) the author explains that his company was running into heap size limits. The company was preparing to tackle this pr

If you read the article (what a novel idea!) the author explains that his company was running into heap size limits. The company was preparing to tackle this problem with a combination of extensive refactoring, server upgrades, licensing expensive third party libraries, and delaying new features while all of the above was done. His "optimization" reduced peak heap usage by half, making all the changes unnecessary.