I totally agree in that I don't expect anyone to get up in the morning and make their mission-of-the-day the optimization of jar. I am just surprised that no one has noticed jar behaving strangely. As a developer, I am frequently on the lookout for programs that hit 100% CPU utilization. This is a very useful indicator. I have top running all the time. I don't run jar frequently... but if I did and it did hit 100% CPU, I would be curious indeed.

I have been at a new job for 2 weeks, using Java EE. My IDE and my application use tons of memory, and I am often waiting for it to respond. Why is it paused? My coworkers just say "garbage collection". But they don't know if that is, in fact, what's happening. If you see jar running at 100%, do you think "oh it's just garbage collection", or "a bug, perhaps?"

Considering the fact that, there are millions of Java developers out there, that open source development has proven true the mantra "with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow", and that this jar bug has potentially been around for years... I am just surprised.

Also, as much as I would love to extrapolate meaning from your single anecdote, I suspect that some people out there are running jar a lot. In fact, the blog post's writer mentions that he was trying to address actual complaints of the user base. It is a "well-known" fact that jar is slow.