I think you've overlooked OPs point a bit. You don't need to understand the C/libc internals to be able to operate MySQL (you do need to know it's quirks thoug

I think you've overlooked OPs point a bit. You don't need to understand the C/libc internals to be able to operate MySQL (you do need to know it's quirks though). With a JVM application, you're going to need to understand the application level configs, think of something like spark, and if you're doing anything with large amounts of data or high RPS, you're also going to need to understand the JVM internals. The closest analog might be needing to understand the libc allocator for certain usage patterns, and that happens, but it's far more rare than someone needing to tune garbage collection algorithms and parameters. JVM tuning is just a reality of operating in the java ecosystem.