Interesting read on one had, a bit disappointing on the other: when the solution is just "we moved to this other product" it smells of lack of serious and rigorous investigation.
Also, having worked with the JVM and with GC issues I don't buy the "GC problems" point: there are a number of improvements in recent JVM release, the main being ZGC (and generational ZGC in particular).
ZGC is great, I've personally witnessed sub-millisecond GC pauses (and i mean sub-millisecond stop-the-world pauses) on machines serving millions of requests per second. Garbage Collection is largely a solved problem in the industry as of today, thanks to ZGC.
Other than this, also comparing latencies for machines with 9TB disks rather than 4TB disks is a bit like comparing apples and oranges: we will never know if issues at the storage layer were affecting tail latencies. Were the node having, i don't know, filesystem fragmentation issues? Does the 9TB storage configuration deliver higher iops than the previous 4TB storage configuration? Is the same kind of hardware underneat (same disk type? same disk bus? or are we talking ssd vs nvme?).
As somebody that's been doing performance engineering for work, this piece is a bit appalling.
GC is a problem, and it always will be at some level. You can improve it but that doesn’t mean it is not a problem. Memory allocation and management is a problem even in c/c++ problems if you want to optimize your program, there is no universe where gc is not a problem
Also, having worked with the JVM and with GC issues I don't buy the "GC problems" point: there are a number of improvements in recent JVM release, the main being ZGC (and generational ZGC in particular).
ZGC is great, I've personally witnessed sub-millisecond GC pauses (and i mean sub-millisecond stop-the-world pauses) on machines serving millions of requests per second. Garbage Collection is largely a solved problem in the industry as of today, thanks to ZGC.
Other than this, also comparing latencies for machines with 9TB disks rather than 4TB disks is a bit like comparing apples and oranges: we will never know if issues at the storage layer were affecting tail latencies. Were the node having, i don't know, filesystem fragmentation issues? Does the 9TB storage configuration deliver higher iops than the previous 4TB storage configuration? Is the same kind of hardware underneat (same disk type? same disk bus? or are we talking ssd vs nvme?).
As somebody that's been doing performance engineering for work, this piece is a bit appalling.
Glad to see they've solved their issue though!