A quick note: Shenandoah is <i>not</i> generational, according to the article. Most bog-standard web apps (including REST thingys; not sure why the author calls out those) do strongly obey the generational hypothesis. For most web apps, in my experience, if you can tune your GC to serve the vast majority of your requests from a young generation, your latencies will be good, your performance will be good, your pauses will be infrequent and short, and plump unicorns and bunny rabbits will gather in your cubicle to share their rainbows.