Memory consumption is often not a major concern on modern systems, saving 50 MB or even 500 MB is seldom as important as the ability to process more requests pe

Memory consumption is often not a major concern on modern systems, saving 50 MB or even 500 MB is seldom as important as the ability to process more requests per second. That's what the original designers of Java thought too. It turns out that this thinking is wrong, though. Main memory may be big, but CPU caches are still small. For example, the laptop I am typing this on has 64 kilobytes of L1 cache, 256 kilobytes of L2 cache, and 3072 kilobytes of L3 cache. That is not a lot. Turns out, when you're spending all your time waiting for main memory, you are not "processing more requests per second." Main memory is at least two orders of magnitude slower than CPU cache.