If you knew the actual set of classes that will be lazily loaded into the JVM for execution, wouldn't it be nice if these classes can be eagerly loaded into the JVM upon start-up ? This particularly matters if you are writing web services, where the latency of the first few requests will be significantly impacted.

Pre-loading classes is easy. But how can we find out the precise set of classes to be preloaded ? It turns out there exists a very nice JVM option:

-verbose:class

Also found an interesting technical report: Eager Class Initialization For Java.