Your experience of the JVM crashing and crashing often is, i believe, rather unusual.
I have been working with the JVM for many years, on large and complex systems, and i recall exactly two actual crashes - one due to a HotSpot compiler bug, and one due to a stack overflow bug in the garbage collector.
I have been part of various Java communities in physical and virtual space for as many years; we spend a lot of our time talking (or shouting) about problems we face with Java and the JVM, and although there is no shortage of them, crashes are not something i hear other people complaining about either.
I do remember Google Wave developers also mentioned crashes on this very site. Actually, according to them, it was one of the problem with Wave project. I cannot provide an exact citation but it is quite easy to crosscheck.
Another well-known story is when digg.com was switched to Cassandra. It keep crashing under load.
To be clear, when one gives it two times the size of workload of RAM, running only one JVM process on a whole server and has no fluctuation either in data flows or connection rate (they call it tuning), well it works.
I have been working with the JVM for many years, on large and complex systems, and i recall exactly two actual crashes - one due to a HotSpot compiler bug, and one due to a stack overflow bug in the garbage collector.
I have been part of various Java communities in physical and virtual space for as many years; we spend a lot of our time talking (or shouting) about problems we face with Java and the JVM, and although there is no shortage of them, crashes are not something i hear other people complaining about either.