Our project uses a large number of mappings and mapped classes. It is a client GUI app, so it is started frequently (as opposed to a web server).

Generating the CGLIB proxies alone takes 5-10 seconds. In principle, this is unnecessary because the proxies generated are the same every time. If they were generated to files on disk, they could simply be reloaded at the next run.

I didn't see any option to do anything like this in Hibernate 2 or 3, does anyone know if there is one? Or if there are any plans for such a feature? Or where I might look to try to implement this myself?

Both Configuration and SessionFactory implement Serializable. So you could save SessionFactory it on a file the first time the app is executed.

Every time that the app starts it could look for that file and load a SesionFactory from it and if doesn't exists create a SessionFactory and save it ...

Please, don't forget to rate.

There is an option, you can use instrumented classes. This will do the instrumentation at build time rather than runtime. It also enables some features that are not available when using CGLIB. Have a look here:

http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/v3/re ... properties

It's pretty easy to implement and all you need to do is pass all of your persistent classes through the Instrument task. It does make it a bit faster to start up, but it doesn't speed up the parsing of mapping files or annotations.

Serializing a SessionFactory to disk could be problematic as you would have to build in additional logic to look for configuration changes. It also doens't solve the issue your are trying to addres which is to avoid the over head of runtime instrumentation.

Ryan-