Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Re: Does it have something to do with reliability?

Yes. Originally, we were using JCA to talk to EPICS PVS and that would core dump occasionally. And we really do NOT want the ETL workflows to be interrupted abruptly. This has since changed in that we use the Java versions of the EPICS libraries and those are quite stable these days. 

Also, the workloads are quite different between the components and separating them out may be less burdensome on GC.

It is also sometimes useful to have the ability to just restart one component  - like the retrieval component which can sometimes get into a death spiral of full GC.

Hope that helps.

Regards,

Murali