Somewhat tangentially: I run a useful app, JBidWatch (a nice, free eBay "sniping"/monitoring tool) on my Windows XP desktop. I started it 1 week ago following a reboot. One week later I noticed the PC's mem usage was nearing the amount of physical memory and investigated; one contributor turned out to be the JVM session running this app: according to Task Manager, this app (actively monitoring no items during the week) was consuming over 100M of memory. Now, I won't stop using it, because I'm not aware of a better tool, and restarting it is not particularly painful, and yes, it's likely this app wouldn't exist w/o the ease of programming offered by Java (though I would prefer a GUI-less version written in a language I am fluent in), but still: 100M of memory for a web-polling app that was essentially idling (from an end-user perspective)? I've observed that various JVM apps gravitate to these (to me) giant memory footprints over time; I assume it's "the nature of the beast", but I'm speaking as a programmer who has never written a line of Java. A sysadmin sitting in the next cube, responsible for various Java-based server apps, has simply agreed with me that this is what's expected from Java apps.