Ok. I'm going to have to disagree since I've seen it in real life several times. Also many large distributed system projects, such as Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Hadoop, etc. are all written in Java.
I guess we'll just have to disagree due to differing experiences. How does a language being used in different distributed system projects mean it's fast? It's just the language they chose to go with. That decision could have nothing to do with speed.