It's very much possible, now more than ever. New JDKs provide more efficient version of garbage collector like epsilon for example. CMS can also do the job if y

It's very much possible, now more than ever. New JDKs provide more efficient version of garbage collector like epsilon for example. CMS can also do the job if you know few tricks. You don't have to be a big nerd to understand them. Documentation is pretty helpful. In my application I was able to get latency for http/rest services less than 15ms which also hit database more than once. Ofcourse it's very subjective to the business use case and networking infrastructure. YMMV If you really want me to pin point the issue, as far as GC on JVM heap is concerned only major difference with other language implementation was that I had to use around 1GB of extra RAM. All i am saying is that, start with idiomatic clojure. If that's not performant enough for you use case, start optimizing the code.