Software Optimization
Over on my Apache Harmony blog I've just pointed at an excellent presentation on Software Optimization and Virtual Machines.
One thing that I think a wide audience might be interested in is this excerp, from a report by Sevitzky, Mitchell and Srinivasan:
J2EE benchmark creates 10 business objects (w/6 fields) from a SOAP message of bytes. 10,953 calls, 1,492 objects created
Modern JVMs are amazing creations!