Spring Application slow startup time using embedded jetty

Question

I am dealing with a rather large web application based on Maven, Spring (3.1), Hibernate which is making use of aspects, ... During development I am using eclipse and embedded jetty. I am facing about 100 different maven artifacts.

Problem is that the local server startup time is very, very, very slow.

What I have found out until now is, that the more maven projects I have opened inside eclipse, the longer the jetty startup time is. My guess it is something concerning classpath, resource loading, ...

The system is hanging for about one minute at the following line: INFO: Initializing Spring root WebApplicationContext"...

Any advices on what to look for or what to tune in order to start the server faster? My fear is that the aspects are slowing down the server startup... Could that be?

I now it is a very general question, but I am currently really stuck and looking for potential problems... So any advice is deeply appreciated. ;)

Thanks for your help! Stefan

Answer 1

actually it turned out it was the pointcuts of our aspects they were not very specific, so every class was scanned via reflection for potential pointcut methods. by making the aspects more specific we could achieve an immense boost in speedup of the sprint context!

Answer 2

It's problably due to annotation scanning through all your classes as suggested here: http://wiki.eclipse.org/Jetty/Howto/Avoid_slow_deployment

You should be able to restrict which jars are scanned while deploying your webapp in jetty.