The new breed of garbage collectors may change this significantly for the better. They need to be explicitly enabled, but there is a GC (G1) that may be better suited for desktop applications (low latency pauses, relinquishes memory to the OS more frequently while idle, etc.) available in Java 11.

It's been the default GC since Java 9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage-first_collector

Ah, I'm confusing its availability with Shenandoah and zgc.

Unfortunately, the last time I used IntelliiJ it came with its own JDK8. Is that still the case, I wonder?

I just ran an update, IDEA and PyCharm use OpenJDK 11, Android Studio still uses 1.8.

They are all concurrent GCs though. You pay for the lower pauses with significant throughput hits.

Thank Garbage Collected languages. I just checked the IDEA config and found its maximum heap is set to 750 MB by default. You typically wouldn't need 32GB to run it.

I changed the maximum heap for my IntelliJ IDEA instances to 2GB and haven't seen a slowdown since. 750M is too low if you're working on a large project imo. Adding a dependency to my pom and immediately debugging used to cause the IDE to chug while it scanned everything.