This paper outlines the design and implementation of the PEVM, a new scalable, high-performance implementation of orthogonal persistence for the Java platform (OPJ). The PEVM is based on the Sun Microsystems Laboratories Virtual Machine for Research, which features an optimizing Just-In-Time compiler, exact generational garbage collection, and fast thread synchronization. The PEVM also uses a new, scalable persistent object store designed to manage 80GB of objects. It is approximately ten times faster than previous OPJ implementations and can run signi cantly larger programs. Despite its greater speed and scalability, the PEVM's implementation is much simpler (e.g., just 43 % of the VM source patches needed by our previous OPJ implementation). This is largely due to the pointer swizzling strategy we chose, the ResearchVM's exact memory management, and simple but e ective mechanisms. For example, we implement some key data structures in the Java programming language since this automatically makes them persistent.