This is probably not a very productive conversation to have, but that simply doesn't match my experience - and frankly a system with "all kinds of performance problems" sounds like incompetence. Short-lived garbage does not cause pauses (GC in a modern JVM can be concurrent, it's only fragmentation that causes pauses), and long-lived garbage generally doesn't need to exist (that's workload-dependent - but the kind of workload where it's important is the kind of workload that's impossible to write without GC). Holding onto objects for longer than they need to live certainly happens, but that's the same problem you have in a non-GC language, and if anything it's easier to diagnose on the JVM which has some excellent tooling around monitoring these things.