Methods, systems, and products are disclosed for optimizing just-in-time (‘JIT’) compiling for a application executing on a compute node, the compute node having installed upon it a Virtual Machine (‘VM’) capable of supporting the application, that include: identifying, by an application manager, a particular portion of the application; assigning, by the application manager, a JIT level to the particular portion of the application; and jitting, by the VM installed on the compute node, the particular portion of the application in dependence upon the JIT level assigned to that particular portion of the ava application.