33 engineers on Hacker News describe using JVM first-hand: 7 endorse it, 9 regret it, 2 are mixed.
“I now manage a team writing languages on the jvm. I have found the jvm ecosystem terrible for observability.”
regret · production · anko · 2026-10-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've hit JVM bugs in my professional career, sure. The JVM always used to be something you could upgrade almost fearlessly”
regret · production · lmm · 2025-11-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it tried to allocate far more memory than necessary, and since this was still a 32-bit JVM it quickly ran out of space”
mixed · production · perlgeek · 2023-10-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I know I haven't even looked at GC params in many years now. Never had to.”
endorse · production · jillesvangurp · 2023-08-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've had the same experience with the JVM, over a longer time period. ... I have never needed to fine-tune the GC.”
endorse · production · lmm · 2022-12-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Having spent several years in the running-JVMs-in-production trenches I would claim the opposite.”
regret · production · 3 yr · lamontcg · 2022-12-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we just brought the JVM onboard, with its own headaches. You end up having to debug obscure JVM errors in production instead of sticking to Clojure.”
regret · production · iostream23 · 2021-12-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we still have outages where the JVM misbehaves or scheduled processes gobble up all of the server's memory and GC slows everything down”
regret · production · KronisLV · 2021-11-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“JVM is super low maintenance runtime, tune it once and pretty much good to go.”
endorse · personal · jpgvm · 2021-10-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It scaled better with way less tweaking than the JVM based stuff we'd written previously required.”
regret · production · lostcolony · 2021-06-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“At JVM shops, the same .jar unfortunately doesn't reliably and reproducibly run the same way across machines.”
regret · production · bedobi · 2021-03-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Never once that I can remember have we had a single production problem caused by the JVM working differently in dev environments.”
endorse · production · koreth1 · 2020-02-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It's a problem that is inherent in the way the JVM's GCs work. They never release memory even if you have low heap usage.”
regret · production · imtringued · 2019-12-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we run on the JVM, and GC pauses are not something that cause us to lose any sleep using out-of-the-box settings”
endorse · production · Fripplebubby · 2019-05-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I and others have had success with MRI on dev and JVM in prod to get around this.”
endorse · production · rurounijones · 2015-07-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The concurrent mark and sweep algorithm caused massive "pregnant pauses" in prod for me! The Parallel GC algorithm performs much better under load”
mixed · production · AdieuToLogic · 2015-07-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“No other ecosystem has so consistently fucked me over. Not even PHP.”
regret · production · nknighthb · 2013-11-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“For reference, we run on the JVM which is very pleasant.”
endorse · production · marcusf · 2012-05-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we run a JVM backend and parsing typescript for the JVM is somewhat of a PITA.”
neutral · production · cogman10 · 2025-06-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I once built a much, much simpler thing that allowed to run multiple JVM threads in a particular kind of lockstep”
neutral · production · nine_k · 2025-05-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“having worked with the JVM and with GC issues I don't buy the "GC problems" point”
neutral · production · znpy · 2024-09-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“This was built on top of JVM and still used a 6 broker Kafka cluster”
neutral · production · kabochya · 2023-08-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The startup I co-founded used Scala (never again ;-) on the JVM eco system”
neutral · production · KingOfCoders · 2022-11-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“for my services running on the JVM, I suppose I need to ensure things can actually build”
neutral · production · tracer4201 · 2019-12-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“In the end we replaced it with a JVM server and a Postgres database.”
neutral · production · royjacobs · 2019-10-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We need to mix JVM with C++ with a sprinkle of Python [via jep].”
neutral · production · pacala · 2017-10-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've worked on a complex re-implementation of a dynamic language and supporting libraries on the JVM”
neutral · production · aardvark179 · 2017-05-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“leverage a bunch of stuff on the JVM that we already built”
neutral · production · rozap · 2016-12-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“mentioned the 2hr/day stop the world GCing going on, dynatrace wasn't able to see them, where the jvm logs could.”
neutral · production · bpchaps · 2016-04-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“At work we migrated from C++ to JVM and .NET languages around 2006.”
neutral · production · 10 yr · pjmlp · 2016-02-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I spend some time studying/improving GC in JVMs”
neutral · personal · randomsearch · 2013-11-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Restarting the JVM was insufficient - we ended up fully rebooting the machines.”
neutral · production · cmorrisrsg · 2012-07-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?