So I got Java 8 on the main server and ran Civtest using it, everything seemed to work just fine (gave me a minor error about max perm size flag, with was previously recommended for spigot but now deprecated in Java 8)
Doing some research most of the improvements don't seem too major. We might gain from a few of them though, specifically
-XX:+UseStringDeduplicationJVM
this allows the G1 garbage collector to de-deuplicate strings in memory, which might be pretty common in our case.
-XX:+UseAES -XX:+UseAESIntrinsics
AES hardware acceleration, MC uses SSL style protocol encryption, depending on the exact details of how that was implemented this could either be a huge gain or do nothing for us. If MC protocol encryption does use anything that can take advantage of AES hardware we are looking at a 3x to 10x speedup for that code component.
No SSE4 flags to enable or anything like that, we currently instruct the JVM to try SSE3 optimization where it can figure it out.
It looks like AES is actually used by MC, that does have the potential to cut down on the 30%+ of the tick connection handling is right now.