I think I have already explained this many times over the reasons not to do this, but I will just add that 450 ms to parse an xml file is certainly unacceptable. That is 1/10 our target boot time, 4 times what our "minimal" equivalent takes to start and several hundred times more than it can take if it was just a simple StAX parser. Note that there will always be at least one web.xml in common configurations of server boot.