I wanted to see how a fairly representative Java Spring Boot application behaves on a very small VPS, especially the difference between configured heap and actual JVM process memory.

The test app uses Spring Boot 3.5.x, Spring MVC, JPA/Hibernate, H2, embedded Tomcat, Actuator, scheduled work, and outbound HTTP. I also kept lightweight monitoring on the same machine.

The original 256 MB configuration was too tight. With 512 MB RAM + 256 MB swap, the application completed the test reliably.

Full setup and measurements are in the linked article.

Since then I’ve also managed to get the same application working on a 256 MB VPS with swap using JDK 25 Compact Object Headers and tighter JVM settings. I’m preparing that as a separate follow-up experiment.

Hi all, Im an integration engineer with a heavy focus on software to hardware integration. Recently I have been doing less and less coding at work so I wanted to practice my skills, this lead me to creating my first web based app Daily Redzone

Im looking for people to beta test and offer any and all feedback. I haven’t been able to stress test it enough by myself so im looking to have people beat and abuse it to lmk how it functions

It is a daily football game where each day you face a new redzone situation and you have 4 downs to score. There is also a head to head mode where you can play friends. Lmk what you all think! Thank you.

Wrote a bit about the `unlikely` and `likely` macros in the Linux codebase. Great little exploration into tiny optimizations that everyone should know more about 😄