We're using Apache Tomcat/7.0.64 and have recently switched to using a cloud-based file system for our static assets (which consists of millions of files). The problem we now face is that the startup time for our app has now gone through the roof (many hours). File system snooping has revealed that Tomcat seems to be scanning the entire static assets directory at startup (which is exponentially slower on the cloud based file-system.)
A work around that we have found is that we mount the static assets only after the server has started up. While this works for the moment, it is not an appropriate long-term solution for us. For now, this does not seem to stem from jar-scanning (i.e., turning off jar-scanning did not change this behavior.) So, the question is: is there a way to turn off this startup static file-scanning behavior?