Speeding up application restarts?

[steve2]

I'm currently running the standard Alfresco community release on a pretty fast PC (AMD opteron) under CentOS.  I'm using the supplied Tomcat container to host the release.

I'm starting to write extensions that include Java code.  I seem to have to restart Alfresco all the time to get my code changes to go live.  This is driving me a bit nuts because it takes something like a minute to stop and then bring back up the Alfresco web app in Tomcat.

Is there a better way?  Is there some trick I haven't learned yet with Tomcat?  If I switch to JBoss or some other container, will this be any better?   Should I look at paring down what parts of Alfresco get loaded?  Should I put everything on a RAM disk?  Or do I just need a faster PC?

Any help at speeding up my build/install/RESTART/debug cycle will be greatly appreciated.

Steve

[kevinr]

Having a custom spring config that disables services you don't need to start (maybe FTP, CIFS etc.) will help. Upgrading disk and CPU will help (changing from my PentiumM laptop to a new Core2 laptop + good laptop HD really helped). Also launching the server using java6 is faster than java5 - but note you can't currently compile Alfresco using the javac.exe from java6.

Tomcat is the fastest container to stop/start. JBoss is slower.

Thanks,

Kevin