Stop Killing Your GC: Moving 10M Token Contexts Off-Heap with Project Panama In 2026, if you are still storing 10-million-token conversation histories on the JVM heap, your Garbage Collector is likely spending more cycles scanning object graphs than your LLM is spending on inference. We have reached the point where "just add more RAM" fails because ZGC pause times and overhead still scale with the sheer density of live objects in the Tenured Generation. Why Most Developers Get This Wrong The Array Fallacy: Treating massive embedding vectors or token IDs as List<Float> or byte[] objects, which creates millions of small objects that choke the G1/ZGC marking phase. Legacy DirectBuffers: Relying on ByteBuffer.allocateDirect() , a clunky, legacy API that lacks deterministic cleanup and forces you into a "hope the cleaner thread runs" strategy. Ignoring Object Header Overhead: Realizing too late that a 10GB context window actually consumes 14GB on-heap due to object alignment and metadata overhead.…