We run multiple applications in Jboss at my work and one of the applications used to take an inordinate time to come up. A typical application would take < 1 minute to get deployed and this particular application for some reason was taking ~7-8 minutes. We initially thought it was a bug in the code and gave hell to our development team :).. But on closer investigation, we found out that a feature we enabled in the Jboss server settings which allows content to be hosted on network storage was causing the issue.
I blogged the feature in Jboss to follow sym links here (https://kudithipudi.org/2008/07/25/howto-configure-jboss-to-follow-symbolic-links/). So essentially when Jboss was started, it was checking all the content in these network path to check for applications to deploy. And traversing a network share with 1000s of directories isn’t fun :)..
We fixed it by making a simple edit to the start up script. Here’s the psuedo code for the script
- Remove soft links to network share
- Start Jboss
- Put soft links to network share
And now the application starts in less than a minute :).
I guess there might be other elegant ways to do this. i.e. Configure Jboss to only deploy certain applications, but this did the trick for us :).
