In Java 8 specifically, a parallel stream is designed to leverage a multi-core architecture. Let’s see how you can use them to run our first attempt of calculating the variance in a faster way.

For another look at benchmarking parallel streams, see “ From Imperative Programming to Fork/Join to Parallel Streams in Java 8 ” by Raoul-Gabriel Urma and Mario Fusco (InfoQ, February 2014).

A preview feature in JDK 22 combines the strengths of virtual threads and parallel streams to improve optimization and performance. Here's how it works.

For example, the Streams API focuses on parallel processing of large data sets, and Project Nashorn’s faster JavaScript engine is all about performance in server workloads.