The Java Performance book by Oaks has some sections on internals. Cliff Click has a talk called “A JVM Does What?” that has some interesting material (very comp

The Java Performance book by Oaks has some sections on internals. Cliff Click has a talk called “A JVM Does What?” that has some interesting material (very compressed though). There’s also some old Oracle or Sun white papers on Hotspot, but I’ve never actually read them. One nitpick to keep in mind: the major JVMs do many things in similar ways but have important differences. In fact, there is a spec that’s much less prescriptive, and JITs are entirely an implementation detail. Often when you read “the JVM does X” it means that the author is talking about Hotspot.