Why Java 17’s New Features and Benchmarks Make It Worth Upgrading

Java 17 Release Overview

Java 8 has long been praised, but Java 17 has now been officially released as a General Availability (GA) version (build 35) with no reported P1 bugs.

Key JEPs in Java 17

JEP 306 – Restore Strict Floating‑Point Semantics

JEP 356 – Enhanced Pseudo‑Random Number Generators

JEP 382 – New macOS Rendering Pipeline

JEP 391 – macOS/AArch64 Port

JEP 398 – Deprecate Applet API

JEP 403 – Strong Encapsulation of JDK Internals

JEP 406 – Switch Pattern Matching (Preview)

JEP 407 – Remove RMI Activation

JEP 409 – Sealed Classes

JEP 410 – Remove Experimental AOT and JIT Compilers

JEP 411 – Deprecate Security Manager

JEP 412 – Foreign Function & Memory API (Incubator)

JEP 414 – Vector API (Second Incubator)

JEP 415 – Context‑Specific Deserialization Filters

Which of these features is most useful to you?

Long‑Term Support (LTS) Significance

Java 17 is the first LTS version since Java 11. Oracle plans to shift LTS releases from a three‑year to a two‑year cadence, with each LTS receiving at least eight years of support. Regular six‑month releases continue to appear in March and September, but they receive only short‑term support.

Oracle’s Free Java License

Oracle now offers a free JDK license (NFTC) that allows unrestricted commercial and production use, redistribution, and sharing, without charge. The free JDK includes all quarterly security updates and will be provided for JDK 17 and future LTS releases.

Benchmark Overview (OptaPlanner)

OptaPlanner benchmarked Java 11, Java 16, and Java 17 using the same hardware (Intel Xeon Silver 4116, 12 cores/24 threads, 128 GiB RAM, RHEL 8) and three garbage collectors (G1GC, ParallelGC, and default settings). Each run solved 11 planning problems (e.g., employee rostering, school timetabling) for five minutes, measuring score calculations per second.

JVM Options

-Xmx3840M

-XX:+UseG1GC (default low‑latency collector)

-XX:+UseParallelGC (high‑throughput collector)

Benchmark Results

Average performance improvements observed:

With G1GC, Java 17 is 8.66% faster than Java 11 and 2.41% faster than Java 16.

With ParallelGC, Java 17 is 6.54% faster than Java 11 and 0.37% faster than Java 16.

ParallelGC outperforms G1GC by 16.39% across all JDK versions.

Images below illustrate the per‑second score results for each JDK/GC combination.

Conclusion

Overall, Java 17 delivers noticeable performance gains, especially with ParallelGC, making it a compelling upgrade for workloads like OptaPlanner. The free Oracle JDK license further lowers adoption barriers, and the new JEPs add modern language and runtime capabilities.