How do I make Tomcat startup faster?

Jars

If you are loading many web applications which which have the same jars in their WEB-INF/lib then consider moving the shared jars from WEB-INF/lib into the tomcat shared directory {catalina.home}/shared/lib This will reduce the memory used by each web app, reduce the size of your your war files, and increase start up time. See http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-5.5-doc/class-loader-howto.html
2. Remove any jar files you don't need. When searching for classes every JAR file needs to be examined to find the needed class. Also during webapp startup, jar files are searched for TLD files. If the jar file is not there - there is nothing to search.

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Make sure your code is not doing slow things. (Use a profiler) 2. Remove any webapps you don't need. (So remove the all the webapps installed with tomcat)

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