Reducing the restart time of IBM Websphere Application Server

Question

A Java web application that I'm working on requires that I restart the server fairly often in order to see the effects of my code changes. I have a local version of WAS 6.0 on my machine that I use to run the app. The server takes about 5-10 minutes to restart. My machine is pretty decent with a dual core proc and 3 GBs of RAM, but the server still takes a fair amount of time.

I'm wondering if anyone has worked on reducing the startup time of a WAS server. I'm looking for tips, tricks, tweaks, or whatever.

Thanks in advance for the help.

Answer 1

Is there any specific feature of WebSphere that your app is using or is it a pretty standard JEE application?

I deploy my applications to WebSphere but do all my development using Tomcat. I can usually get it to restart in about 20 seconds or so. But my applications usually aren't using anything WebSphere specific (MQ, JNDI, security stuff, etc.) so not sure if this helps you.

Aside from Tomcat there are other lightweight JEE servers you could try like Jetty or Geronimo.