Summary

Deprecate the AggressiveOpts flag in JDK 11 because it's behavior is ill-defined. The flag will then be removed in JDK 12.

Problem

AggressiveOpts has been used as a catch-all method of enabling various experimental performance features, mostly targeted to improve score on very specific benchmarks. Most things it affected has been removed or integrated over time, leaving the behavior of the flag ill-defined and prone to cause more issues than it'll solve. The only effect that the flag currently has is setting AutoBoxCacheMax = 20000 and BiasedLockingStartupDelay = 500. Both can be done manually by setting the corresponding flags on the command line.

Solution

Deprecate the flag in JDK 11 and then remove it in JDK 12.

Specification

The AggressiveOpts will be marked as deprecated in JDK 11.