The industry and the academic community continuously strive to provide generic benchmarks that emulate many common programmatic problems for Java. This is, of course, is of interest to JVM vendors and hardware vendors (to make sure that the JVM itself performs well and also for marketing purposes). However, the standardized benchmarks often provide some insights on tuning the JVM for a specific problem. It is recommended to have a look at some of the things that the industry tries to benchmark in order to understand how Java can be applied to different problem domains.

Naturally, standard benchmarks for anything and everything exists. Many software stacks are subject to performance measurement standardization, with organizations releasing benchmarks for everything from application servers down to network libraries. Finding and using industry-standard benchmarks is a relevant exercise for the modern Java developer.