Spring Boot's Blind Spot: Why Startup Time Metrics Mislead

Evaluating Spring Boot's JVM alternatives (standard, AOT, GraalVM) based purely on startup time obscures critical production costs that actually matter. This gap is significant because cold-start metrics hide real performance differences that only emerge under realistic workloads combining CPU-intensive operations with actual database access, causing teams to make incomplete architectural decisions. Comprehensive benchmarking with genuine application endpoints reveals that native and classic JVM behaviors diverge meaningfully only during real work execution, not in synthetic tests, demanding more sophisticated performance profiling strategies.