Improving the IdP's startup time on tomcat

[Max Spicer]

I've been looking to improve the startup time of our IdP as on tomcat it
was taking around 4 minutes 30 seconds.
https://shibboleth.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/IDP5/pages/3199511039/Troubleshooting
is very useful and the advice to run with unpacked wars immediately takes
the startup time down to around 40 seconds on tomcat9.

I've also looked at
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/TOMCAT/HowTo+FasterStartUp.
This suggests setting metadata-complete="true" in web.xml and adding an
empty <absolute-ordering /> element. This takes almost another 10 seconds
off the time.

These last changes stop Tomcat from scanning the web application and its
libraries for classes that use annotations to define components of a web
application (Servlets etc.). If there is a SCI with a @HandlesTypes
annotation it also means it will not scan for classes that use annotations
or interfaces specified in that annotation.

Can anyone confirm whether this is a safe thing to do with the IdP
application?

Thanks,

Max Spicer
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