JAXB Startup lag when upgrading from Jackson Core v2.9.10 to v2.10.0

[thissmattwilson]

Hi everone. I have a J2EE app running on WebSphere (9). Our app uses JAX-RS to talk to the server from a Vue client, but we use some SOAP client libs to call out to other web services from out server side (all our code is Java 8)

Last year, we upgraded from an old version of Jackson (2.4, I think) to address a CVE, and one of the consequences of that was that our SOAP clients took longer to initialise - from close-to-no-time-at-all to ~30 seconds (for the biggest one). Not the end of the world, but I'd like to figure out why.

I think that the delay in initialisation is in the processing of the JAXB Context, I came across the same issue many years ago on a different project. It only needs to happen once (per deployment - we have a few nodes) and then it's fine - but it confuses the users a bit when there's a random 30 second delay.

I tried out different versions of Jackson Core, and it seems that the problem strikes when I upgrade from 2.9.10 to 2.10.x (or later). It seems that the older versions of Jackson were using a JAXB Context Factory that was very fast, but it seems to have been removed in 2.10. I THINK (rummaging through the code on github) that it might have been an Eclipse-related library.

I don't know what I don't know, so I'm not sure what other information to include here. Can anyone think of anything that I can try? It would be grand to have the old startup performance back again. Thanks!

Some vital stats:

WebSphere Platform 9.0.5.18 [ND 9.0.5.18 f5182346.02] [JAVA8 8.0.6.30 pxa6480sr6fp30-20210507_01]
Host Operating System is Linux, version 3.10.0-1160.90.1.el7.x86_64
Java version = 1.8.0_291, Java Runtime Version = 8.0.6.30 - pxa6480sr6fp30-20210507_01(SR6 FP30),
Java Compiler = j9jit29, Java VM name = IBM J9 VM

[JooHyukKim]

Both are long deprecated versions. Have u tried with later versions?

Also, plz share with us the reproducible code that initializes Jackson components (Jackson only) that takes up 30seconds.

Second question is asked because I haven't seen any case that taking that long.

[cowtowncoder]

I do not remember what kind of change might be relevant, but the component most likely pertinent is from here:

https://github.com/FasterXML/jackson-jaxrs-providers/

and release notes are under ./release-notes/VERSION-2.x.

Looking at 2.10.0 release, one thing is addition of JPMS Module info, so perhaps JDK/JVM module system adds overhead.
But that's not something you can do much about.

I would second @JooHyukKim 's suggestion on trying out somewhat newer versions to see if they might help.