Why Java 11 Overtook Java 8 and What It Means for Your Projects

Java 11 becomes the new standard

In 2020 Java 11 had just been released for over a year while Java 8 still held an 84.48% share. Two years later Java 11’s production usage surpassed Java 8 for the first time, reaching 48.44%, with Java 8 falling to 46.45%.

Java 17, although eagerly anticipated, remains low on the adoption chart because ecosystem support (e.g., Spring Boot 3) is still evolving.

Thus moving from Java 8 to Java 11 is a sensible incremental upgrade rather than jumping straight to Java 17.

Most popular non‑LTS release: Java 14

Since Java 9, new versions are released every six months but receive support only until the next release, leading to low usage of non‑LTS releases—just 2.7% of applications.

Among these, Java 14 is the most widely used despite limited vendor patching.

Oracle shrinking, Amazon rising

JDK distribution has shifted: while Oracle still leads, its market share dropped from about 75% in 2020 to roughly half that amount, whereas Amazon’s share grew from 2.18% to 22%.

Since November 2021, Eclipse Adoptium and Amazon have shown opposite trends in the rankings before Java 17’s release.

Resource allocation in containers

CPU allocation

Containerized applications tend to run with fewer than four CPU cores, and many small‑core instances lose the concurrency benefits of the default G1 garbage collector, often falling back to the serial collector.

Memory allocation

About 80% of containerized apps explicitly set JVM memory limits via -Xmx or -XX:MaxRAMPercentage. Since Java 9, container‑aware JVM features mitigate earlier memory‑related issues when the JVM is the sole process in the container.

Most used garbage‑collection algorithm

Garbage collection remains a hot topic; the report shows a clear shift toward the G1 collector after Java 8, especially for Java 11 and newer versions, due to its improved defaults and performance.