JBoss EAP is slow to start

Solution Verified - Updated 16 Jan 2025

Environment

Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP)
- 4.x
- 5.x
- 6.x
- 7.x
Red Hat JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform (SOA-P)

Issue

JBoss startup is slow.
JBoss is taking almost 2 minutes to boot the server in default configuration without any applications deployed.

Resolution

One way to help mitigate a slow startup is to slim JBoss and remove unnecessary services:
Another option is to minimize deployments and annotation scanning:
- How can I turn off annotation scanning of a deployment in JBoss EAP?
- How do I prevent EJB3 annotation scanning of jars in JBoss EAP?
Check for antivirus scanning which could be slowing execution. Norton is for example notorious to slow JBoss down. Exclude the JBoss directory from being scanned.
Check for filesystem performance issues and use a locally mounted filesystem for best performance
See the resolutions in the referenced root cause documents below.
Disable any antivirus that may be preventing JBoss from starting.
Startups on EAP 5 and earlier will never exactly be fast as it is a single threaded start up process. If start times are important to you, consider upgrading to EAP 6 if you haven't already. Large efforts were made to improve start times in EAP 6 as it now offers multi threaded, concurrent start processes for much quicker start times compared to prior releases.
For large applications in EAP 7+, generate jandex indexes beforehand per JBoss slow to start with long jandex indexing times for large applications

Root Cause

Diagnostic Steps

General

Review the JBoss boot.log and server.log and verify how long it takes for startup and if there are any associated errors or warnings.
Set JBoss logging to TRACE and compare the startup of an empty container to that with application(s) deployed.
Enable trace for the following category and check which aspect of the deployment is taking so long

       <category name="org.jboss.deployment">
         <priority value="TRACE" />
       </category>

Use a profiler to determine where the majority of clock time is spent.
Check whether NFS mount is being used. If it is, obtain information on the NFS transfer rate.
Enable garbage collection logging and analyze it to see if there are long pauses or low throughput that explain the slowness.
- How do I enable Java garbage collection logging?
- How do I analyze Java garbage collection logging?
Get multiple thread dumps and look for what the "main" thread is doing over time.
- How do I generate a Java thread dump on Linux/Unix?
- How do I generate a Java thread dump on Windows?

Solaris / SunOS

Start JBoss with truss logging system calls to see what is happening at the system call level during the gaps in the JBoss logging. Edit run.sh as follows (line 285)

      # Execute the JVM in the foreground
      truss -dleaf -o truss.txt  "$JAVA" $JAVA_OPTS \
               -Djava.endorsed.dirs="$JBOSS_ENDORSED_DIRS" \
               -classpath "$JBOSS_CLASSPATH" \
               org.jboss.Main "$@"

Linux

Start JBoss with strace logging system calls to see what is happening at the system call level during the gaps in the JBoss logging. Edit run.sh as follows:
```
      # Execute the JVM in the foreground
      strace -f -o strace.log "$JAVA" $JAVA_OPTS \
```

SBR

JVM & Diagnostics

Product(s)

Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform

Components

jbossas

Category

Troubleshoot

Tags

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