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It's an interesting observation. I think that the modern approach to distributed systems is moving towards golang style microservices and lightweight / simple

by nvarsj 7y ago

It's an interesting observation. I think that the modern approach to distributed systems is moving towards golang style microservices and lightweight / simple system design with RPC communication, reconcile type loops for state reconciliation, and backing CP databases. I think this is the influence of k8s (and maybe google's approach to distributed systems). I will almost certainly get downvoted for this (as I always seem to when I criticize the JVM), but Apache/JVM style architecture feels REALLY long in the tooth to me. I think you are committing to an outdated and very expensive approach to building software if you use anything running on the JVM, especially Apache based anything. Cassandra is a great example of this - out of the box it's a terribly performing database that is extremely expensive to run and tune. Throw enough resources and time at it and you can get it to acceptable scalability - but running on the JVM which is a huge memory hog will always make it expensive to run (and even then, you will always get terrible latency distributions with the JVM's awful GC). If I was building a business I would run far far away from any JVM based solution. The only thing it has going for it is momentum. If you need to hire 100s of engineers off the street for a large project, then a JVM based stack is about your only option unfortunately.

squarecog 7y ago
I understand your architecture criticism, and think it has merit, but I'm not sure why Apache gets dragged into that. Apache Airflow is in Python. Apache Arrow is in C. CouchDB is Erlang. There's a ton of projects Apache Foundation hosts that fit your description but it's a mistake, I think, to confuse individual projects with Apache in general. Bad enough that people confuse the license with the foundation.
- nvarsj 7y ago
  Sorry, you are right. It would probably be more accurate to use Spring actually. I was thinking of Cassandra/Zookeeper specifically when I said Apache.
vips7L 7y ago
For what its worth I have a java microservice running on 13mb of ram.
- geodel 7y ago
  Without knowing what that service does, how many users/request it serves per second/day, I can only assume it just an http listener up on some port that returns "Hello {username}" when someone sends a GET request.
  - vips7L 7y ago
    Nah, its full Java EE. Its fully possible to run low profile java. https://quarkus.io/ https://quarkus.io/
lenkite 7y ago
Nowadays Java based micro-services can compile to native thanks to Graal native-image and frameworks like: https://quarkus.io/ https://quarkus.io/.
james-mcelwain 7y ago
> the JVM's awful GC This just makes it seem like you are trolling. JVM devs have done more to advance state of art in this area than any other language. The problem is that most JVM apps just produce too much garbage, not necessarily that the algo itself is awful. Either way, there's no such thing as an optimal GC algorithm, just different trade-offs depending on your use case. Not everyone cares about latency.
- geodel 7y ago
  > The problem is that most JVM apps just produce too much garbage, This is strange way of saying that Java the language and most frameworks around it force apps to generate this much garbage.
  - james-mcelwain 7y ago
    No, it's a way of saying that Java != the JVM. The JVM's GC is not "awful" precisely because so many Java frameworks are awful.
- nvarsj 7y ago
  I stand by that - I really think the JVM has a bad GC, and it has cost businesses billions probably. There is no trade off here - the JVM & Java have incredibly high memory requirements due to poor design - and this leads to all kinds of issues (like the bad GC latencies). No other language has this kind of problem as badly as the JVM does, even other GC languages. And we shouldn't accept this anymore - look at how much better golang's GC is for real world usage.
herewego 7y ago
Though criticizing the JVM is fair game, this sounds too absolutist. I like and dislike some things about C++, Java, Scala, Python, Bash, SQL, etc. I bet you do too, no?

by nvarsj 7y ago

squarecog 7y ago

I understand your architecture criticism, and think it has merit, but I'm not sure why Apache gets dragged into that. Apache Airflow is in Python. Apache Arrow is in C. CouchDB is Erlang. There's a ton of projects Apache Foundation hosts that fit your description but it's a mistake, I think, to confuse individual projects with Apache in general. Bad enough that people confuse the license with the foundation.

nvarsj 7y ago
Sorry, you are right. It would probably be more accurate to use Spring actually. I was thinking of Cassandra/Zookeeper specifically when I said Apache.

vips7L 7y ago

For what its worth I have a java microservice running on 13mb of ram.

geodel 7y ago
Without knowing what that service does, how many users/request it serves per second/day, I can only assume it just an http listener up on some port that returns "Hello {username}" when someone sends a GET request.
- vips7L 7y ago
  Nah, its full Java EE. Its fully possible to run low profile java. https://quarkus.io/ https://quarkus.io/

lenkite 7y ago

Nowadays Java based micro-services can compile to native thanks to Graal native-image and frameworks like: https://quarkus.io/ https://quarkus.io/.

james-mcelwain 7y ago

> the JVM's awful GC This just makes it seem like you are trolling. JVM devs have done more to advance state of art in this area than any other language. The problem is that most JVM apps just produce too much garbage, not necessarily that the algo itself is awful. Either way, there's no such thing as an optimal GC algorithm, just different trade-offs depending on your use case. Not everyone cares about latency.

geodel 7y ago
> The problem is that most JVM apps just produce too much garbage, This is strange way of saying that Java the language and most frameworks around it force apps to generate this much garbage.
- james-mcelwain 7y ago
  No, it's a way of saying that Java != the JVM. The JVM's GC is not "awful" precisely because so many Java frameworks are awful.
nvarsj 7y ago
I stand by that - I really think the JVM has a bad GC, and it has cost businesses billions probably. There is no trade off here - the JVM & Java have incredibly high memory requirements due to poor design - and this leads to all kinds of issues (like the bad GC latencies). No other language has this kind of problem as badly as the JVM does, even other GC languages. And we shouldn't accept this anymore - look at how much better golang's GC is for real world usage.

herewego 7y ago

Though criticizing the JVM is fair game, this sounds too absolutist. I like and dislike some things about C++, Java, Scala, Python, Bash, SQL, etc. I bet you do too, no?