[jgalt212]

> Infrequently-used Java methods might never be compiled at all, potentially incurring a performance penalty due to repeated interpreted invocations.

That sort of makes no sense. How can you incur a real performance hit if the uncompiled method is rarely called?

[smitherfield]

I would assume if the method is rarely called, but very complex or time-consuming when it is called.

Of course, I'm not an expert on JVMs, so I wouldn't know whether their analysis is synchronous or asynchronous or a mix of both.