Java is still relatively sluggish until it gets rolling. Any realistic Java benchmark has to spend a good amount of time just convincing the JVM to start being

Java is still relatively sluggish until it gets rolling. Any realistic Java benchmark has to spend a good amount of time just convincing the JVM to start being serious before the benchmarks will give good results. So for people whose use cases look more like "small tool" than "web app," Java can still appear rather slow.