Java theory and practice: Urban performance legends, revisited
The Java language is the target of a lot of abuse for performance. And while some of it may well be deserved, a tour of message board and newsgroup postings on the subject shows that there is a great deal of misunderstanding about how a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) actually works. In this month's Java theory and practice, Brian Goetz pokes some holes in the oft-repeated performance myth of slow allocation in JVMs.
Old article, but quite an interesting read about the performance of memory management (and Garbage Collection in general) in the JVM compared to traditional, manual memory management as in C and C++.