Index: org/postgresql/core/Utils.java
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvsroot/jdbc/pgjdbc/org/postgresql/core/Utils.java,v
retrieving revision 1.7
diff -u -r1.7 Utils.java
--- org/postgresql/core/Utils.java	8 Jan 2008 06:56:27 -0000	1.7
+++ org/postgresql/core/Utils.java	2 Jun 2008 08:08:59 -0000
@@ -11,7 +11,16 @@
 
 package org.postgresql.core;
 
+import java.nio.charset.Charset;
+import java.nio.charset.CharsetEncoder;
+import java.nio.charset.CodingErrorAction;
+import java.nio.charset.CharacterCodingException;
+import java.nio.CharBuffer;
+import java.nio.ByteBuffer;
+
 import java.sql.SQLException;
+import java.util.Arrays;
+
 
 import org.postgresql.util.GT;
 import org.postgresql.util.PSQLException;
@@ -38,6 +47,10 @@
         return sb.toString();
     }
 
+    // Keep a local copy of the UTF-8 Charset so we can avoid 
+    // synchronization overhead with getBytes()
+    private static final Charset UTF8_CHARSET = Charset.forName("UTF-8");
+    private static final byte[] EMPTY_BYTEARRAY = new byte[0];
     /**
      * Encode a string as UTF-8.
      *
@@ -49,15 +62,18 @@
         // faster than rolling our own converter (it uses direct buffers and, I suspect,
         // a native helper -- and the cost of the encoding lookup is mitigated by a
         // ThreadLocal that caches the last lookup). So we just do things the simple way here.
-        try
-        {
-            return str.getBytes("UTF-8");
-        }
-        catch (java.io.UnsupportedEncodingException e)
-        {
-            // Javadoc says that UTF-8 *must* be supported by all JVMs, so we don't try to be clever here.
-            throw new RuntimeException("Unexpected exception: UTF-8 charset not supported: " + e);
-        }
+        //
+        // Updated: It turns out that Java is particularly bad at caching more than 2 character sets
+        // so it's better to use the underlying nio classes here to perform the UTF-8
+        // conversion with a local copy of the UTF-8 Charset object.
+        //
+        if (str == null) {
+            return EMPTY_BYTEARRAY;
+        }
+        ByteBuffer buf = UTF8_CHARSET.encode(CharBuffer.wrap(str));
+        byte[] b = new byte[buf.limit()];
+        buf.get(b, 0, buf.limit()); 
+        return b;
     }
     
     /**