I guess at least their work has confirmed what we probably already knew intuitively: if you have CPU-intensive tasks, without waiting on anything, and you want to execute these concurrently, use traditional threads.
The advice "don't use virtual threads for that, it will be inefficient" really does need some evidence.
Mildly infuriating though that people may read this and think that somehow the JVM has problems in its virtual thread implementation. I admit their 'Unexpected findings' section is very useful work, but the moral of this story is: don't use virtual threads for this that they were not intended for. Use them when you want a very large number of processes executing concurrently, those processes have idle stages, and you want a simpler model to program with than other kinds of async.
I'll put it this way: to benefit from virtual threads (or, indeed, from any kind of change to scheduling, such as with asynchronous code) you clearly need 1. some free computational resources and 2. lots of concurrent tasks. The server here could perhaps have both with some changes to its deployment and coding style, but as it was tested -- it had neither. I'm not sure what they were hoping to achieve.
The advice "don't use virtual threads for that, it will be inefficient" really does need some evidence.
Mildly infuriating though that people may read this and think that somehow the JVM has problems in its virtual thread implementation. I admit their 'Unexpected findings' section is very useful work, but the moral of this story is: don't use virtual threads for this that they were not intended for. Use them when you want a very large number of processes executing concurrently, those processes have idle stages, and you want a simpler model to program with than other kinds of async.