Java has had a number of different garbage collection algorithms over the years, including serial, parallel, concurrent

If you’ve gotten this far, um, thanks for reading. Frankly, I’m just a girl who just graduated college and has no idea what she’s doing with her life, but I love videogames, and I love(d?) League of Legends. If you asked me why I’m posting this, it honestly does come down to that sense of outrage and anger about this stupid character — about the fact that a company like Riot can try to sell a full person, complete with hopes, dreams, mental health issues, and pink hair as a $25 skin that comes with a walking, talking Twitter feed for you to get emotionally attached to. It’s a quaint idea, but when you think about it more closely, the idea of a marketing team in some office in Los Angeles trying to sell a product by coming up with the most ~relatable~ and marketable things to tweet out of the account of a ‘girl’ who coincidentally looks like me, and talks like me, and sounds like me, and draws like me?

Peter Nagy and I presented a paper at the Oracle Groundbreakers Tour 2020 LATAM in August, 2020 titled “Go Java, Go!” where we asked ourselves the question “can Java microservices be as fast as Go?” We created some microservices and did some benchmarking, and we presented our results at that event. But there was more to explore, so we decided to turn our presentation into this post. We plan to follow up with additional posts as we do more testing and development.

In the end, I don’t have anything to say about Genshin Impact’s gameplay, nor can I rightfully criticize it in any regard. I’m not interested in it, but I can’t deny the sheer number of people who love it. Ultimately, the discomfort I feel in regards to the publicity it has received since release is that when you raise the open-world anime RPG curtain, there’s still some manipulative, unforgiving mechanics pulling the strings backstage. By releasing on PC and consoles instead of just mobile, Genshin Impact was introduced to an entirely new market, dodging the negative connotations of digital gambling and engrossing hordes of new consumers unfamiliar with the shady side of free-to-play monetization.

We wanted to experiment to see if Java microservices could run as fast as Go microservices. Common industry belief seems to be that Java is “old,” “slow” and “boring;” and that Go is “fast,” “new” and “cool.” But we wanted to know if those characterizations were warranted or supported by actual performance data.

Let’s talk about the “problem with Java.” It has a reputation for being slow, which is probably not justified any more but more historical. It does have some performance sensitive areas including the heap, where object data are stored; the garbage collector, which manages the heap; and the just in time (JIT) compiler.

If you start to think about it, everyone who responds to her Tweets or Instagram posts is generating advertising and revenue for a $6 billion dollar game company. That entire idea is really disgusting to me, not just because she looks like me, but as a person who consumes and loves games. When hype for something is organic, that’s one thing — Nintendo isn’t exploiting me when I retweet their announcements and say how much I love The Legend of Zelda. But when Riot makes a character that looks and sings and Tweets like a person, they’re knowingly creating a “person” that doesn’t exist in a way that intentionally takes advantage of the way that human beings relate to other people, just biologically and emotionally, and then they’re making tons and tons of money from it. And honestly, as V-Tubers and virtual influencers from Riot and beyond start crossing the line into looking and acting like real people, that’s something that we should all be really concerned with.

Her skin is for sale at $25 a pop, so “Seraphine” is going to make Riot Games literal millions of dollars. And with her Twitter account posting that she’s insecure and could “really use some encouraging words” because she “needs something to believe in right now”, this character essentially gets every single person who interacts with her pity party to advertise their multi-billion dollar videogame franchise.

For many, this genre is about pulling that overpowered character, or the one they want the most, or the newest, hottest girl. Or guy. Monsters? Sure. The stress-filled gambling that fuels the gacha economy is what drives content, community discussions, and memes about the genre as a whole.

Java was developed by Sun Microsystems, who were acquired by Oracle. Its 1.0 release was in 1996, and the latest release was Java 15 in 2020. The main design goals are portability of the Java virtual machine and bytecode, and memory management with garbage collection. It is still one of the most popular languages (according to sources like StackOverflow and TIOBE), it is developed in open source.

Just because the game is free to download doesn’t mean the entire experience is free, or that no one else will be tempted to spend money on a game specifically designed to make you want to spend money. Designed so well, in fact, that it generated $100 million in revenue in the first two weeks. At that point, if the interesting gameplay mechanics or characters you desire in an open-world action RPG are locked behind repetitive grinding, a mediocre stamina system, daily rewards, a battle pass and an unscalable gacha paywall… does the game being “free” really mean anything?

If someone gets invested in Genshin Impact because they’re a fan of RPGs, anime or Breath of the Wild, but they aren’t too good with handling finances, or they really, REALLY want the strongest warrior with the biggest sword or the cutest girl with the biggest bahonkadonkers, it can easily lead to addiction, massive amounts of reckless spending, and in the worst cases… crippling debt. Self-control should not be a prerequisite for enjoying a video game, nor does it excuse manipulative design tactics.

Streamers and YouTube creators (whether sponsored or not) further push this agenda by advertising Genshin Impact using cutesy or clickbait titles about the hundreds to thousands of dollars they’ve spent on the game so far, parading around their ability to drop amounts that would be incredibly unhealthy for the average player. Peeking into the Genshin Impact section on Twitch to be presented with titles like “$1,300 spent so far :)” is very bizarre, to say the least.

We wanted a fair test, so we created a very simple microservice with no external dependencies (like a database for example), and with very short code paths (just manipulating strings). We did include metrics and logging, since these seem to be always included in any real microservice. We used small, lightweight frameworks (Helidon for Java and Go-Kit for Go) and we also experimented with pure JAX-RS for Java. We experimented with different versions of Java and different JVMs. We did some basic tuning of the heap size and garbage collector. We warmed up the microservices before test runs.

Just because the game is free to download doesn’t mean the entire experience is free, or that no one else will be tempted to spend money on a game specifically designed to make you want to spend money. Designed so well, in fact, that it generated $100 million in revenue in the first two weeks. At that point, if the interesting gameplay mechanics or characters you desire in an open-world action RPG are locked behind repetitive grinding, a mediocre stamina system, daily rewards, a battle pass and an unscalable gacha paywall… does the game being “free” really mean anything?

https://assifonte.org/media/hvc/Video-ZSC-Lions-HC-Ambri-Piotta-v-en-gb-mgf-.php

http://main.dentisalut.com/zwo/Video-ZSC-Lions-HC-Ambri-Piotta-v-en-gb-kwy30122020-.php

https://assifonte.org/media/hvc/videos-ZSC-Lions-HC-Ambri-Piotta-v-en-gb-lzq-.php

http://main.dentisalut.com/zwo/videos-ZSC-Lions-HC-Ambri-Piotta-v-en-gb-yzr-.php

http://go.acaps.cat/npt/Video-dusseldorfer-v-iserlohn-roosters-v-de-de-1kqg-19.php

https://assifonte.org/media/hvc/Video-SC-Bern-HC-Davos-v-en-gb-xcw-.php

http://main.dentisalut.com/zwo/v-ideos-SC-Bern-HC-Davos-v-en-gb-hwh-.php

http://main.dentisalut.com/zwo/video-SC-Bern-HC-Davos-v-en-gb-umh-.php

https://assifonte.org/media/hvc/videos-SC-Bern-HC-Davos-v-en-gb-jyb-.php

https://assifonte.org/media/hvc/video-SC-Bern-HC-Davos-v-en-gb-xpz-.php

http://main.dentisalut.com/zwo/video-SC-Bern-HC-Davos-v-en-gb-okz-.php

http://main.dentisalut.com/zwo/Video-HC-Lugano-Geneve-Servette-HC-v-en-gb-zpx-.php

https://assifonte.org/media/hvc/Video-HC-Lugano-Geneve-Servette-HC-v-en-gb-ypo-.php

https://assifonte.org/media/hvc/videos-HC-Lugano-Geneve-Servette-HC-v-en-gb-bpd-.php

http://main.dentisalut.com/zwo/videos-HC-Lugano-Geneve-Servette-HC-v-en-gb-azs-.php

http://go.acaps.cat/npt/video-lettonia-v-italia-v-it-it-1lsg2-23.php

https://assifonte.org/media/hvc/video-HC-Lugano-Geneve-Servette-HC-v-en-gb-jum-.php

http://main.dentisalut.com/zwo/videos-HC-Lugano-Geneve-Servette-HC-v-en-gb-dfd-.php

https://assifonte.org/media/hvc/video-Maccabi-Tel-Aviv-Alba-Berlin-v-en-gb-vui30122020-.php

http://main.dentisalut.com/zwo/Video-Maccabi-Tel-Aviv-Alba-Berlin-v-en-gb-mbi30122020-.php

etween, on the one hand, language and mathematics, which is formed of logical statements and definitions, and, on the other, perception, between the pure order that the human mind would have and the controlled chaos that is reality. Truth is only possible when we escape reality into the mind, but it is a truth that then has only a tenuous connection to lived experience.