Story of how we reduced app startup time by 20x and heap usage by 7x
Few months ago, we started developing a Spring Boot app in Groovy. It is a typical app with ton of CRUD logic and few REST endpoints. It also had a Swagger UI configured with SpringFox Swagger. Though it was taking ~35 seconds to start and taking ~700MB heap space, no-one in the team really cared about the slowness and memory usage of the application.
As our application grew bigger, we added more DB tables and endpoints which resulted in further slowness and required more heap space. It was ~3 minutes startup with almost 1.4GB heap at its worst state. Again no-one really bothered to fix it... until the application randomly failed to start and started crashing randomly with OutOfMemoryError.