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Comment by lelanthran

4 days ago

> Typically web applications lean heavily on garbage collection and memory safety, because their bottlenecks are very rarely CPU/memory issues.

I dunno about this assertion. Maybe it seems like the bottleneck is rarely CPU/memory when you're throwing 1GB RAM + dedicated instance at a webapp, but, for example Jenkins absolutely trashes any 1GB RAM instance because it runs out of RAM and/or CPU.

My homegrown builder/runner CI/CD system, running the same `go build/test` commands, the same `git checkout` commands etc, written in C, peaks at a mere 60MB of RAM usage.

I feel we are collectively underestimating just how much extra RAM is needed the popular languages that run a typical GC.

[EDIT: I no longer even use my simple C app - I find a `make` cronjob for every 2m uses even less RAM, because there is no web interface anymore, I ssh into that machine to add new projects to the makefile]