This is exactly why so much garbage collection optimization is apples and oranges. It is trying to mitigate the performance problems from things you shouldn't d

This is exactly why so much garbage collection optimization is apples and oranges. It is trying to mitigate the performance problems from things you shouldn't do in the first place if you care about speed. Heap allocation, heap deallocation and the pointer chasing that comes along with the memory fragmentation are possibly the biggest killers of speed outside of scripting languages but java was designed in a way that it forces people into way of programming. As a result, enormous research has gone into trying to deal with something that could have been avoided completely.