In JDK 9 the internal character storage of the java.lang.String, StringBuilder and StringBuffer classes has been changed from a UTF-16 char array to a byte array plus a one-byte encoding-flag field. The new storage representation stores/encodes the characters either as ISO-8859-1/Latin-1 (one byte per character), or as UTF-16 (two bytes per character), based upon the contents of the string. The newly added encoding flag field indicates which encoding is used. This feature reduces, by 50%, the amount of space required for String objects to store the characters if the String object only contains single-byte/ latin-1 characters.

A new jvm option -XX:-CompactStrings has been introduced in JDK 9 to disable this feature, which might be worth considering when
- It is known that the String objects used in jvm/application will be overwhelmingly multi-byte character Strings.
- In the unexpected event where a severe performance regression is observed in migrating from JDK 8 to JDK 9 and the analysis concludes the Compact String representation is the reason.