It depends on memory usage patterns. In some cases Java's GC could be even faster than malloc/free. I could say more, it's meaningless to discuss such provocative topic as "performance" with no any details.
The only thing to do, is get on your coconut radio and wait for the planes to bring you some cargo. While you are waiting, Kafka is a useful MQ for event processing and is being used to solve real world problems today.
RAII in C++ is a good pattern, but it does not avoid performance penalty of cascading release of resources, impossibility of using exceptions in destructors or thread contention with shared resources.