If you are using the Spring framework, here's a good tip on how to speed up the start up. Don’t use classpath*:*.xml wildcards. When you use these wildcards, Spring needs to search through all of the jar files. Even worse, in some cases it has to expand the files and then things really come to a crawl. If you must use wildcards in Spring, try using a classpath:/foo/bar/*.xml search. This is faster as that can delegated to the JDK. Of course, your best speed would be had by not using wildcards of any sort.