Java™ Performance and Scalability, Volume 1: Server-Side Programming Techniques

Introduction

Java performance has been a hot issue ever since the arrival of Java in the mid 1990s. In the early days, performance was a serious concern as first-generation Java virtual machines (JVMs) executed Java programs by interpreting bytecodes. The addition of just-in-time (JIT) compilers to the JVM has allowed it to compile Java bytecodes to machine-specific instructions on the fly and to skip bytecode interpretation on subsequent invocations of compiled methods. Depending on the specific workload, JIT compilers have roughly increased Java speed by an order of magnitude. The Java HotSpot technology has added the ability to selectively compile the performance-critical methods, apply massive inlining to that code, and use the latest and ...