using classpath: in spring

Question

I have two questions regarding classpath: option in spring :-

1) Does classpath: search for resource relative to the document in which it i

Answer 1

Does classpath: search for resource relative to the document in which it is specified(in case of web applications)?

No, classpath: is always relative to the classpath root. If you put a / at the start of the path, it is silently removed.

Is it more fast to search if i give direct location of resource instead e.g. classpath:/WEB-INF/classes/myfolder/myfile.txt

No, that won't work at all. The classpath root contains /WEB-INF/classes, so the path should be relative to that.

Don't confuse classpath: paths with file paths, they have no relation to each other.