Hi, I upgraded one of my 2.0.8 applications to Spring 2.5.5 just by replacing the old spring-2.0.8.jar with the new spring-2.5.5.jar and spring-webmvc-2.5.5.jar. As a result, the hot deploy times increased drastically. The application was otherwise unmodified , so we're definitely not using any specific 2.5.5 features (i.e. component-scanning) Here are some timings from my local machine (win xp), the application is deployed as an unpacked WAR in Weblogic's autodeploy directory. I hotdeployed the app 5 times in sequence, without making any request to the application in between. Timings are taken from the "Root WebApplicationContext: initialization completed in X ms" message. The server was restarted and WLS jar caches were cleared in between runs. 2.0.8 (ms) 6562 6000 5969 6844 6894 2.5.5 (ms) 27203 28532 32141 34345 32562 There is an almost 500% increase in deploy time. Also, I noticed that the 2.5.5 deployment time seems to increase with the number of times deployed (it went as high as 38s). http://forum.springframework.org/showthread.php?p=188252 seems to indicate something similar, but he's using component-scanning. If there is anything I can do to troubleshoot this or provide more information let me know. Thanks, Jorg Heymans