Native Image Performance

Lets compare the performance of GraalVM native-image and Java11 on AWS Lambda.

Quick reminder, the handler isn’t doing much at all. This project has minimal functionality and few dependencies.

@Override
public APIGatewayV2HTTPResponse handleRequest(APIGatewayV2HTTPEvent event, Context context) {
    context.getLogger().log(event.getRequestContext().getRequestId());

    return APIGatewayV2HTTPResponse.builder()
            .withStatusCode(200)
            .build();
}

Test	Memory	Init	Duration
Java 11 (Cold)	2048 MB	418.41 ms	14.71 ms
Java 11 (Warm)	2048 MB	-	1.71 ms
Native Image (Cold)	256 MB	256.62 ms	12.70 ms
Native Image (Warm)	256 MB	-	1.01 ms

Not only is GraalVM native-image faster, it’s faster with a vastly less resources. CPU is allocated proportionally to memory when you use AWS Lambda.