This thread is similar to: Disable taglib scanning in google app engine (Jetty) The author of that thread accepted a wrong answer. We were trying to reduce the appengine startup time of my instances I've come accross the taglib TLD classpath scanning. My application has 50mb of jars. The scanning of the tld takes 20% of the startup time: (Image from Yourkit capture of the startup time). You can also set logger.properties level to ALL and you will see the classpath scanning issue going on. Is there a way to disable that on appengine? God forbid us to have anything to do with taglibs, JSP, or