[ignasl]

Here is java comparison of various self balancing trees (https://intelligentjava.wordpress.com/2015/04/09/self-balanc...). It seems that AVL tree is doing quite well.

[loeg]

This article only evaluates self-balancing binary trees. Binary trees have terrible cache properties and something like a B-tree (or LSM-tree for the write-heavy variant, or B-eta trees) will have much better performance than an AVL tree.