I had an eclipse project that was taking around a minute to assemble the war file. There was a huge amount of javascript code(~50mb) that wasn’t actually necessary anymore so I stripped it out. When I did this, it went from taking a minute and a half to assemble the war to taking 5 seconds.
I assume that the extra time was spent compressing the javascript code. While this makes sense, there are plenty of other static files being included in the war that don’t seem to be causing a delay. They’re mostly jpeg files, so I assume that the war generation process knows not to compress jpegs.
Is there a list of what files do and don’t get compressed, and is this list configurable?
No, the format is fixed. A war file is just a jar file with a specific file hierarchy defined by the Java EE spec. A jar file is really just a zip file with some extra meta-data added to it. So the short answer is… everything is compressed. 50 megs of javascript code (really???) is certainly going to take a long time, especially if you don’t have a SSD.