Programming language performance is something that nearly everyone cares about at some point, whether they realise it or not. If you’re a programmer, you sometimes have to make your programs run fast; if you’re a user, you might be frustrated at a program that runs slowly, without knowing that it’s caused by a poor programming language implementation. Those of us who work on, or around, programming language Virtual Machines (VMs) tell a good story about performance, but a surprising number of users seem unhappy with the performance of their programs. Sometimes, yes, they’re unrealistic, but are they always so? In this first blog post (based on this paper) of two, I’m going to show that programs running on VMs often don’t follow the simple performance patterns that nearly all of us expected. Perhaps that’s why users aren’t as happy as VM developers think they should be?