Published on Oct 20, 2022
It is a plug-in replacement for Java 8 that promises significant improvements in memory management and performance.
Oracle this week announced Java SE Subscription Enterprise Performance Pack, bringing modern garbage collection algorithms and other benefits to Java 8 servers still in use today.
As of October 17, Enterprise Performance Pack offers significant memory management and performance enhancements and serves as a drop-in replacement for JDK 8. JDK 8 users have access to improvements made to Java in the seven years between the release of JDK 8, which was released in March 2014, and JDK 17, which was released in September 2021. Besides garbage collection, Enterprise Performance Pack includes improvements to compact strings, enhanced observability, and dozens of other enhancements.
The Enterprise Performance Pack is now available to Java SE subscription customers and OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) users at no additional cost through MyOracleSupport. This pack will provide immediate benefits for JDK 8 workloads running near memory or CPU capacity, according to Oracle. As a result of testing on Oracle’s own products and cloud services, memory and performance of heavily loaded applications have been improved by approximately 40%. According to the company, performance could improve by as much as 5% for JDK 8 applications that are not running near capacity.
It is still popular despite the fact that JDK 8 is nearly nine years old. New Relic, in its 2022 State of the Java Ecosystem report, found that 46.45% of Java applications were using JDK 8. As opposed to so-called feature releases such as the current JDK 19, which is supported by Oracle at the Premier level for only six months, JDK 8 and JDK 17 are Long Term Support (LTS) releases.
While Enterprise Performance Pack offers many benefits with its default options, Oracle recommends studying the documentation to maximize performance and minimize memory usage. The -XX:+UseZG option can be used to improve application responsiveness by enabling the scalable low-latency ZGC garbage collector.
On Intel and Arm-based systems, such as Ampere Altra, Enterprise Performance Pack supports headless Linux 64-bit workloads.
