Legend has it that Urs Hölzle sorted out their Java problems:
Page ended up working with another grad student (Scott Hassan, who later ended up founding eGroups, which later became Yahoo!Groups), who rewrote the whole thing in Python. Google's crawler and webserver were in Python until the Netscape deal (summer 1999). When Urs was hired as Google's first VP, he started transitioning the system to C and C++ to solve Python's performance problems. Java was introduced when Google hired some very skilled Java programmers during the 2001-2003 recession.
So yes, Urs sorted out Google's Java problems by not using Java.
He also worked at eGroups. He wrote "medusa" which became asyncore in the Python standard library (http://www.nightmare.com/medusa/). This was long before Java had async I/O. Interesting that Guido is working on the new async I/O interface "tulip" in the Python core after all these years!
And Larry Page's brother apparently also worked at eGroups.