Is there any way to speedup the initialization of a SessionFactory. I have a standalone application that uses the following initialization code:

Configuration cfg = new Configuration().configure("/hibernate.cfg.xml");
SessionFactory _sessionFactory = cfg.buildSessionFactory();

Works fine. The only problem is that when running and re-running my app in a debugger, it is time consuming to initialize the Configuration and SessionFactory. I wrote a standalone initializer application that tries to create the SessionFactory, then serialize it to a file so that the main application can simply de-serialize it and initialize faster. When I test this standalone initializer app by doing the following:

1. Create a SessionFactory
2. Serialize it to a file.
3. Deserialize it from the file.
4. Create a Hibernate session.

...it seems to work. The SessionFactory is created, serialized to the file, re-read and deserialized, and then Hibernate creates the Session.

But when I try to deserialize the SessionFactory from my main application (run as a new Java process from the application that wrote the serialized SessionFactory to the file) I get the following exception:

InvalidObjectException - "Could not find a SessionFactory named: null"

...and the following is written to the console:

21:44:46,170 WARN SessionFactoryObjectFactory:148 - Not found: ff808081f86c369800f86c36ab5c0000
21:44:46,179 WARN SessionFactoryObjectFactory:138 - Not found: null

Does anyone know why this happens, and whether this approach can work. If not, I would appreciate any other suggestions as to how to speed up SessionFactory initialization.

Thank you,

Rick Horowitz