I am experiencing a problem with slow start up times for Tomcat 7. I have done some testing by tweaking configuration parameters both on Linux CentOS kernel version 2.6.18 and on Windows 7 using this link as my primary guide: http://wiki.apache.org/tomcat/HowTo/FasterStartUp and managed only a modest improvement. The improvements seemed to result when I added metadata-complete="true" attribute to the element of my WEB-INF/web.xml file and when I added the names of almost all the jars we use for our application to the tomcat.util.scan.DefaultJarScanner.jarsToSkip property in conf/catalina.properties file. I've also used this JAVA_OPTS in the setenv.sh file: JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -server -Xms1536m -Xmx1536m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m -XX:NewRatio=2 -XX:+UseParallelGC -XX:ParallelGCThreads=2 -Dsun.rmi.dgc.client.gcInterval=1800000 -Dsun.rmi.dgc.server.gcInterval=1800000 -Dorg.apache.jasper.runtime.BodyContentImpl.LIMIT_BUFFER=true " but actually saw my start up times increase slightly. Our QA and production environments are on Linux CentOS so I'm hoping to get more information on improving Tomcat 7 start up times in that environment. My primary role is java developer and I don't have much system administration experience so I appreciate any input. Thank you for your time and suggestions.