Didn't look too deep, but this might be due to the fact that call sites are memoized for invoke calls as part of the invokedynamic improvements (but really Meth

Didn't look too deep, but this might be due to the fact that call sites are memoized for invoke calls as part of the invokedynamic improvements (but really MethodHandle::invoke and MethodHandle::invokeExact are where the magic is as is mentioned by the JVM spec IIRC). Regardless, MethodHandle invocations are always going to be faster than reflection Method invocations. A primary reason is that the parameters for invoke and invokeExact are not subject to the same boxing and runtime-validation requirements as reflection.