BOOK: Optimizing Java

An interview with the authors can be found here:

https://www.infoq.com/articles/book-review-optimizing-java

Quoting:
"Key Takeaways

Performance tuning in Java is an experimental science.

There are no magic “go faster” command-line switches for the JVM.

There are no “tips and tricks” to make Java run faster.

The execution speed of Java code is highly dynamic and fundamentally depends on the underlying JVM.

The behavior of JIT-compiled code is significantly more important than the interpreter itself.

This book offers both theory and practice on how to performance tune in Java.

This is a comprehensive book that represents a tutorial for beginners and a reference for experienced Java performance tuning practitioners."

See also: JITwatch

SW Construction: Building taking into account perfomance?

Maybe so. Because of hardware security flaws and its workarounds:
http://www.idgconnect.com/blog-abstract/29406/why-spectre-demands-elegantly-coded-software

Citando:
"Why Spectre demands more elegantly coded software

Write it well, write it efficiently, write it as though the underlying hardware isn’t going to get any faster. Because it isn’t"

(...)

"There are some Spectre-immune systems, but they tend to be slow or old or both. The Raspberry Pi is one and I’m writing this article on another, a pre-2013 Intel Atom box. It doesn’t do out-of-order (OoO) execution, but therefore it doesn’t do anything particularly quickly. This is now the choice facing everyone who cares about security: fast and flawed or slow and safe (or at least safer).

Until that changes, until a new generation of chips somehow circumvents the flaws and gives us full-speed computing without speculative execution vulnerabilities, software developers must step up and make a difference. Yes, efficient coding is suddenly back in fashion, because developers can no longer assume that tomorrow’s hardware will be faster than today’s. But what does this mean in development terms?"