Comparative Performance and Energy Efficiency Analysis of JVM Variants and GraalVM in Java Applications

Java has dominated the ICT market for almost thirty years with various applications in nearly every sector all over the world. One of Java's main drawbacks comes from its heavyweight core - the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Therefore, several JVM distributions have been developed to address this issue. GraalVM is the most promising amongst the recent distributions, providing better performance, low power consumption, and reduced carbon footprint emissions. In this research, a comparative analysis based on performance and energy efficiency metrics was conducted to assess this JVM distribution in light of three other classic JVM distributions: Amazon Corretto, Adopt OpenJDK, and Zulu. Findings showed that, although there was no significant difference between the test candidates, GraalVM seemed to be the leading JVM distribution. It is recommended that programmers and technology businesses consider adopting GraalVM in their future Java applications because of its energy efficiency.