&gt; well the JVM has a really shitty startup time<p>The JVM does not have a shitty startup time. Starting up a JVM takes 50-80ms. What takes time is HotSpot&#x27;s warmup -- getting to peak performance. Erlang doesn&#x27;t have this problem simply because it never gets anywhere near HotSpot&#x27;s performance.<p>As to thread pools, that&#x27;s an apples-to-oranges comparison. Erlang&#x27;s processes should be compare to Java tasks or fibers; not to Java&#x27;s heavyweight threads.