HotSpot vs. OpenJ9: which one to choose to cut cloud bills

Which Java Virtual Machine to choose? HotSpot is a reference implementation now developed within the OpenJDK project. OpenJ9 is another JVM initially developed by IBM and later contributed to the Eclipse Foundation. OpenJ9 claims excellent performance based on the DayTrader7 benchmark application study, where three fine-tuned OpenJ9 configurations are compared to default HotSpot.

Let’s check whether HotSpot can be configured to show comparable performance results. We will look into experimental setup, reasonable tunings, and results for startup, footprint, latency, and throughput using different hardware and operating systems. This is how we maximize the efficiency of deployments in practice.