OpenJDK 14 Has Some Performance Improvements But OpenJDK 8 Still Strong

Given this week's general availability release of OpenJDK 14, here are some fresh benchmarks looking at all the major releases from OpenJDK 8 through 14 while looking at the JVM performance across multiple workloads.

Curious to see how OpenJDK 14 is performing in relation to previous releases for the JVM performance, I ran some fresh benchmarks on an AMD Ryzen 9 3950X system with Ubuntu 19.10 + Linux 5.6 for seeing how the performance is comparing to previous releases. In particular, how OpenJDK 14 is performing in relation to OpenJDK 8 that for most workloads is still the fastest release in recent years.

This testing is just looking at the JVM performance with using the same Java bytecode compiled Java programs on each of the releases tested, using the reference/upstream compiled versions of the software packages under test. The same options were used each time and no other changes were made besides swapping out the OpenJDK x86_64 Linux builds used for testing each release.

Via the Phoronix Test Suite these tests were done from SPECjbb to Java 2D workloads.