Spring Boot Startup Time Sucks? Here’s the 5-Step Fix

Are you tired of waiting for your Spring Boot application to start? Slow startup times can be a real pain, especially during development when you need to restart your application many times. The good news is that there are several practical ways to speed things up. In this article, we’ll walk through five effective steps to cut down your Spring Boot startup time.

Why Is Spring Boot Startup Slow?

Before diving into solutions, let’s understand why Spring Boot applications can be slow to start:

1. Lots of Components: Spring Boot scans and loads many beans and components.
2. Auto-configuration: Spring Boot tries to guess what you need and sets up many things automatically.
3. Classpath Scanning: Searching through your entire project for Spring components takes time.
4. External Resources: Connecting to databases, message queues, and other services adds extra time.
5. Web Server Startup: Starting embedded servers like Tomcat takes additional time.

Now, let’s look at how to fix these issues.

Step 1: Use Lazy Initialization

One of the easiest ways to speed up startup time is to use lazy initialization…