It depends on your application. I'm working on an application in Node right now that keeps hundreds of megabytes of configuration in memory since each model can

It depends on your application. I'm working on an application in Node right now that keeps hundreds of megabytes of configuration in memory since each model can take seconds to generate, and due to recent changes the # of models doubled. It's not a good design. I've been trying to get buy in on using an LRU cache... Also, I've worked in a few environments (Java and Node) where a spike of requests come into the system and prevent the GC from running - and then you run out of memory. I think that mostly went away with G1. We had a lot of stuff that ran on our customers sites and was prone to traffic spikes... I've learned that if you're not thinking about GC it usually bites you later. Better to think about performance, at least a little, up front.