Java 8 introduced lambda expressions and streams, which were met with enthusiasm for their functional programming style and syntactic sugar, though they can result in a significant performance hit compared to traditional methods like iterators and for-each loops. A benchmark test comparing the performance of these new features with longstanding Java methods revealed that traditional imperative programming approaches remained faster, especially in tasks like finding the maximum value in an ArrayList. While optimizations such as parallel streams and eliminating auto-boxing can improve performance, the test highlighted that simple loops often outperform the more modern approaches, with iterators and for-each loops being particularly effective. The study was carried out using JMH on an Amazon EC2 instance, and it prompted a discussion about the potential pitfalls and optimizations of Java 8's features, emphasizing the importance of carefully considering performance implications when adopting new programming paradigms.