Depends. Java's GC can be tuned an infinitum. It's not a simple task and requires knowledge, but that's the beauty of it: if you need low-ish latencies, then you can tune the GC to target that instead of throughput. For example we're using relatively large heaps (partly due to inefficiencies in our code), but we still want to stay under 500 msec/request or so. So we told the G1 GC to target 150 msecs per collection, and then adjusted our heap size / code accordingly. It works well.

If you need really hard limits on collection then that's a tricky problem, but that's also tricky when you're managing memory yourself.

+1K on this. tail latencies are bad.

GC without tuning. With optimization, not so much.