Yes, that is possible. Java was dead slow early on (I first used it soon after it came out, and pioneered use of servlets in my company at the time), but after Sun's management threw millions of dollars and high-end tech people at the problem, it got fast enough for many uses in a few years, what with the Hotspot VM and JIT tech and so on.

Sorry, the millions of dollars was mostly for marketing (which is largely what led to its huge adoption), but at least some of that money would have been used to hire top people like computer science compiler specialist PhDs to work on making it faster. I had read about that at around that time.