We are using Hibernate 3.6.9/JPA 2.0 (persistence.xml and orm.xml files), and I am looking for ways to help my applications startup time and memory footprint. The problem isn't specifically how I am using Hibernate, it's just that I am looking for ways in each of the frameworks I use to streamline the startup of the applications.

I have read the documentation on InstrumentTask and as a newbie to this topic, it's a little confusing to me.

Could I ask what the main reasons are for looking into using InstrumentTask during compile time?

Would this help the startup of my application and some of the initial memory footprint since this operation is being done during compile time as opposed to runtime? And is this reason enough to attempt the migration to using this feature?

One last question, is there a simple resource that describes how to implement this when using orm/persistence files? Do I just change the fetching mode for all associations to proxy and use the sample AntRun tasks to perform the instrumentation during the compilation of my jar file?