Oracle introduces a direct replacement for JDK 8

To deliver Java 17-level performance to traditional Java 8 server workloads, Oracle announced with the Java SE Subscription Enterprise Performance Pack. It is claimed to be a direct replacement for JDK 8 and is now available on MyOracleSupport for All Java SE subscription customers and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) users are offered free of charge.

“The Enterprise Performance Pack provides JDK 8 users with the major memory management and performance improvements that were brought to Java in the seven years between the release of JDK 8 and JDK 17. These improvements include: modern garbage collection algorithms, compact strings, enhanced observability, and dozens of other optimizations.”

Java 8 was released in 2014 and, like Java 17, is a Long Term Support (LTS) release; despite being released almost nine years ago, it is still widely used by many developers and organizations. New Relic has published a State of the Java Ecosystem 2022 Report shows that Java 8 is still used by 46.45% of Java applications in production.

According to the presentation, Enterprise Performance Pack supports headless Linux 64-bit workloads on Intel and Arm-based systems such as Ampere Altra.

For its part, Oracle says customers using Enterprise Performance Pack will immediately see the benefits of JDK 8 workloads running at or near memory or CPU capacity. Tests with Oracle’s own products and cloud services have shown approximately a 40 percent increase in memory and performance for high-load applications. Even JDK 8 applications that do not run close to capacity can see performance gains of up to 5%.

While many of the improvements included in the Enterprise Performance Pack are available through default options, Oracle recommends that users research their own documentation to maximize performance and minimize memory usage. For example, improving application responsiveness by enabling a scalable low-latency ZGC garbage collector requires the -XX:+UseZGC option.