"There is not much difference in performance between Java and C, except when you want to do some esoteric tricks - the kinds hackers love but that make maintenance hell."
"Measure, don't guess. Developers are trained to look at code, and when something goes wrong, they look at code - and you can always find something wrong or ugly that's begging to be fixed. And that can throw you right off the track of the actual issue. Delay looking at the code until you have a solid measurement or clue as to exactly which part of the application is responsible for the problem."