There's also a selection bias in effect. Plumbr is not yet a household name. Speculating wildly, I suspect that they don't have enough clients using it at sca

There's also a selection bias in effect. Plumbr is not yet a household name. Speculating wildly, I suspect that they don't have enough clients using it at scales that would provide meaningful statistical input. Many Java devs, when looking for object/memory/resource leakage, will turn to the well-known general purpose tools, such as JProbe, YourKit, Introscope, or even just JVM profiling output and verbose gc. Crazy people will start using DTrace or JMX hooks. The rest will just say they need a hardware refresh. As you say, this is an analysis of metrics gathered from people looking for a 'free' solution. The reason for the 'small' mx settings could be that developers are finding ways around procurement to find leaks on the same machine running their IDE, email, browser, etc.