Out of interest, what stack are you running on? The Spring apps I've worked with in the past (plain Tomcat+Spring) never took more than a few seconds to boot (and most changes could be hot deployed without a restart).
Sorry, I just deleted the parent that you replied too. I felt it was too full of emotion and lacked useful content.
Currently I am working on Spring+Tomcat. Previously we were working on weblogic + spring, that's where the ~50% CPU time measurement came from.
The project where I found myself the most frustrated with Spring was in a simple console app, where Spring became the server container. The application was more or less empty, having only a few database connections, and it took probably about 10 seconds to boot up. I really remember thinking "this is as fast as it will ever be" it only got slower from then on.
