OpenJDK 14 Has Some Performance Improvements But OpenJDK 8 Still Strong

With Apache HBase we were tending to see OpenJDK 8 run the fastest or otherwise the results came out largely flat between the tested reference Java versions.

With SPECjbb, OpenJDK 8 was by far the fastest. The SPECjbb performance on OpenJDK has improved since version 11, but still not quite to the speeds of OpenJDK 8 at least on this AMD Ryzen 9 3950X system running Ubuntu Linux.

When taking the geometric mean of all the Java benchmarks carried out, OpenJDK 8 was to little surprise the fastest Java version benchmarked in this article. It's to little surprise as we frequently hear from the industry about OpenJDK 8 still offering the best performance and also why Intel's Clear Linux has stuck to that version among other similar cases. The good news though from this geometric mean is that OpenJDK 14 was the second fastest version of the releases tested with a very narrow lead over the previous versions.