Having got back into Java a bit recently I was surprised how fast it was (coming from python/Perl and php).
Speed doesn’t matter always, but when it does it Java feels snappy. Our programs our command line based so our framework use is limited. Also the built in data structures are nice. I still find getting Java’s set up painful, which is a huge impediment for us using it more.
It's hard to separate the absolute performance of Java the language from Java the culture where inefficient patterns or attempts to implement dynamic behaviors in some framework code defeat the JIT (not to mention the benefits of type-checking). If you have a team which cares, it should be faster but the average business app I see does not have that team and will, if lucky, perform within the same order of magnitude as Python.