I think you're ignoring that people don't want to "tune" their GC. They just want it to work. So instead, they are going with the obvious route of just buying more RAM. This is perfectly fine on servers, which is where Java shines. As soon as Java has to be used for e.g. CLI scripts, daemons, or situations in which multiple process instances have to run at the same time, then Java is an incredibly poor choice and there is nothing you can do about that. If you are a genius at memory optimization in Java then you'll see even bigger gains in C++ or Go or Lua or Javascript or Python. Some of these options may not be as fast as the JVM but this discussion is purely about memory usage.