Memory vs job security

How interesting is that....
watching the InfoQ presentation on "no GC pauses"(sic), really made me think about something totally different. Firstly they were discussing the heap size that you use. Do most developers even know how much heap they have allocated to their application. At first I thought no, but then again I remember each time I've had to increase the heap. but the really odd thing is that there seems to be a trend at the moment to have reached an artificial cap at the moment at 2-4GB of heap... but the presentation went on to say who uses over 100TB of Heap!!! wow, am I working on small systems or what!!!
An interesting aside is that we need to use more memory to ensure job security. At first I was highly critical of this, but it makes sense I guess, but only in that, by increasing the memory used we are increasing the reach that the application has. By reach I talk about scaling. Which leads me to another thought, by using clusters we are already breaking that artificial barrier, mainly because we have to use xGB of memory on each server. So how many of us are actually running our applications on xGB ram on clustered systems. The majority of us I suspect.


If anything this article was highlighting to me, is that the imagination is the only limitation to what we can do with Java at the moment. So its time to stop thinking about memory and worrying about it so much and let the hardware guys worry about getting us more cheaper ;) Can other languages claim that !!! Long live the king, long live Java!!!


With cheap servers, come limitations, so buy decent hardware, which is still relatively cheap. I recently bought a file server for less that a R1000, it has a dual core AMD 64bit 1.3 GHz processor 4Gb Ram and a 250Gb HDD, so if an end user can buy something like that for home and cannibalise it for a media centre ;) how cheap is good hardware then??? Are companies being short changed and badly, because vendors are used to charging exorbitant fees for them? 


Yeah that was all over the show, sorry...  can't promise I'll improve the thought process in later posts though ;)