Performance difference between spring javaconfig, xml config and annotations

Question

Our Spring configuration contains about 1200 beans, and we use component-scan/@Autowired. If we exported the ApplicationContext as an Xml (and still used @Autowired), we sav

Answer 1

I would guess a bit less, because no parsing will have ho happen (the annotations are 'parsed' with reflection, the xml - with an xml parser).

That, however, should not be a reason to choose one configuration option over the other. Startup time is not important for performance.