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Comment by ex3ndr | Hacker News Reader

Isn't we can just spin one more VM for each instance instead of paying 3k$?

VMs adds a noticeable overhead / performance hit.

Besides the benefits the new JIT provides, Zing will help you if your workload runs with / consumes over 8GB of RAM. At this point, HotSpot GC pauses [1] starts becoming noticeable (i.e. jitter).

Notes:

[1] - http://www.azul.com/resources/azul-technology/zing-consisten...

For actual end-user experience and impact of using Zing on AWS/Cassandra, check out: https://twitter.com/garryturk/status/859883566267871232

Not only that but you can also use the money to buy faster CPU.

From where? They aren't making Alphas anymore, or GaN 5GHz LN2 cooled monsters. At this point SiC is the material as power dissapation has become the limiting factor.

Faster CPU does not eliminate GC pauses if your workload consumes a large amount of RAM. This is one of the other benefits which Zing provides.

You can load balance your app for 3.5k $ on additional server. By reducing load, time spend in GC will be less. Additionality by having more hardware you can use more aggressive strategy[0].

[0]http://www.cakesolutions.net/teamblogs/low-pause-gc-on-the-j...

I have taken Zing for a spin on 24 c3.8xl ec2 instances running Elasticsearch with 32G heaps and just under 2 billion indexed documents with millions of updates/day. The results are considerably better. If I just went up to 30 or even 50 ec2 instances on HotSpot/Openjdk, I would see no performance benefit with regard to GC. And I have performed this test. I'm not saying dont use Java because of GC, but I am saying don't overestimate the value of more efficient garbage collection in any case.

Shoutout to the Azul guys, Simon, Elaine and Paul for coming on-site and watch me compile all their extensions on Amazon Linux and help me perform all the testing.

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