What I have experienced is that for end users, they are mostly interested in seeing their (usually large) deployments show noticeable improvements in deployment time, not necessarily from a cold boot of the server, but when the server is already up and they either want to deploy something new or re-deploy their application.
+1 the deployments increase the time until “ready to perform work”. This is the point we should use as a reference. Anything before (i.e. blank WF without deployments) is just marketing IMO.
I agree that deployment time is important, but I just want to point out that not all usages of WildFly involve deployments. Examples include proxy servers, static content servers, message brokers, javascript code, transaction managers, and service based applications.
--
Jason T. Greene
WildFly Lead / JBoss EAP Platform Architect
JBoss, a division of Red Hat