A new article at JavaWorld shows that the top performing VM was IBM's running on OS/2! In fact it even narrowly beat the TowerJ native compiler indicating that at long last we might be entering a new era of VMs suitable for running real applications on! IBM also won on Windows NT, being over 10% faster than both platforms. The article also has some interesting points on scalability, pointing out that both the Microsoft and the Sun VMs have limited stack space, thereby limiting their scalability.