Java Sound dramatically slower after JVM 8 update

Question

My Application loads a bunch of audio clips at startup. It uses java.applet.Applet.newAudioClip(URL audioFileURL) to load the files, which are in the same folder. I could see that this function is basically a wrapper to get JavaSoundAudioClip objects

Until yesterday, I compiled the JAR with JDK 7 and launched it with JRE version 7 update 45. Then I updated to version 8 update 31.
Now, the loading of each audio takes ten times longer than before (was 0.2 seconds each, now it is between 2 and 3 seconds)
The same behaviour happened on different hardware configurations. OS is 64bit Windows 7, both Java 7 and 8 runtime environments are 32bit.

Digging deeper in debugging, I found that the methods that slowed down the most are AudioSystem.getAudioInputStream , AudioSystem.isLineSupported , AudioSystem.getLine

Audio format shouldn't be involved: I tried both OGG and WAV with the same results.

The settings for both JVMs are the same

EDIT: even I couldn't reproduce the problem in a small program made ad-hoc. Java 8 is slower indeed, but only with a 10% factor. There must be something in particular with my application and the libraries I'm using that is conflicting with audio system and/or its streams. I will update as soon as I find out.

Answer 1

Finally, I found out what was causing the problem. I used jar-in-jar-loader (as far as I know, it's equivalent to Eclipse option "Package required libraries into generated JAR") to include library jars inside my application. Until now, this never had any noticeable impact on performance.
But with Java 8 I experience this tremendous slowdown. Monitoring the application with jconsole I noticed it was often blocked waiting for zip deflate operations, so something must have changed in JRE version 8, which is now less optimized for jars inside jars.

I resolved choosing to extract all library jars and then packaging them in my application jar.