It&#x27;s absolutely very uncommon to have a single collection of several million in the languages I mentioned in the web-app space IME.<p>Anyways, that&#x27;s my experience with Ruby. Since each allocation (at the time) took 23 bytes of memory, even object graphs c# or Java might consider fairly modest (say loading 10,000 rows with a dozen fields into an Array&lt;User&gt;) would burn through a silly amount of memory comparably and probably trigger a GC cycle.<p>We&#x27;re talking nanoseconds on the compiled side vs hundreds of milliseconds.<p>It takes a very very high N to overcome that sort of issue. One you might run into in scientific computing a lot more frequently, but not the sort of issue you&#x27;d often (if ever really) run into writing a web-app.