The ORMBench application highlighed the performance cost of Ebean's default transaction logging mechanism.
The refactor is to make the transaction logging more performant.
The fix was to introduce a buffer of log messages (per transaction) - have those added to a concurrent queue - and use a background thread to pull these buffers off the queue and log them to a file.
The output only uses a flush when it is not busy writing to get maximum use of the buffering of the write.
Fixed in HEAD.