[kvhdude]

This has been my experience as well. I shifted from embedded systems programming to web services world briefly. I found that scale up approach has been so maligned that it is ok to spin up several hundred ec2 instances running a (poorly written) java application instead of a single multi core instance running erlang that performed much better. Some frameworks even ran web services in php and spent all effort in not having the request reach php code since it was doing like 10 reqs/sec.

[laurencerowe]

Not a Java fan, but the single multi core instance being more perform any than a fleet of VMs is likely language independent.