EclipseLink Startup Lag

I took a few minutes to look into the startup timing differences between EclipseLink and Toplink Essentials. It looks like with EclipseLink they have changed the way the login information is handled for the decryption of the password. Previously in TopLink Essentials, the password was decrypted through the SecurableObjectHolder, which forced the JCEEncryptor to be initialized only upon creating the new instance. In EclipseLink, rather than initializing on first use, they are pre-initializing the JCEEncryptor through the SecurableObjectHolder and then decrypting the password. Another difference between the EclipeLink and TopLink Essentials encryptor, is with EclipseLink they are creating a separate cypher for encryption and decryption. Having looked at the code, this makes sense from a performance scaling perspective. Having separate encryptors/decryptors means that you do not need to reinitialize them for each encryption or decryption. Of course, on startup that would mean the instantiation of not one cypher (for decrypting the password) but two, which does account for about a 4000 ms* difference in the profile runs. This interesting enough is also the difference between the application startup running either EclipseLink and TopLink Essentials.

* Since I am profiling in Netbeans with All Classes the performance numbers themselves are quite poor. What is more interesting is the ~ 18% performance degradation on startup this causes.