Do we really still need a 32-bit JVM?
Even today (and it's 2015) we have two versions or Oracle HotSpot JDK - adjusted to 32 or 64 bits architecture. The question is do we really would like to use 32bit JVM on our servers or even laptops? There is pretty popular opinion that we should! If you need only small heap then use 32bits - it has smaller memory footprint, so your application will use less memory and will trigger shorter GC pauses. But is it true? I'll explore three different areas: Memory footprint GC performance Overall performance Let's begin with memory consumption. Memory footprint It's known that major difference between 32 and 64 bits JVM relates to memory addressing. That means all references on 64bit version takes 8 bytes instead of 4. Fortunately JVM comes with compressed object pointers which is enabled by default for all heaps less than 26GB. This limit is more than OK for us, as long as 32 bit JVM can address around 2GB (depending on target OS it's still about 13 times l