Spring MVC web app: application context starts twice

Question

I\'m working on a Spring MVC REST API. Everything works fine, which is great, but I noticed from the logs that every time I restart my app the applicationContext loads twice

Answer 1

mvc-dispatcher is loading 2x because that is how you've defined it

<context-param>
    <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
    <param-value>/WEB-INF/mvc-dispatcher-servlet.xml</param-value>
</context-param>

and at

<servlet>
    <servlet-name>mvc-dispatcher</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
</servlet>
<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>mvc-dispatcher</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

the first approach is usually for loading something like a "global" or "root" context, where you might put all the bean/resources shared by multiple servlet contexts.

The second approach is usually for loading a specific servlet context. As the first answer in this post points out, it uses naming convention to find the mvc-dispatcher config file, so you don't need to explicitly define it.

Do you have everything defined in mvc-dispatcher-servlet.xml? If so you can remove the

<context-param>
  ..
</context-param>

definition, otherwise you can (which I recommend for future maintainability) separate your configuration into multiple files. Then load shared beans/resource in something like a root-context.xml (via the first method), and each servlet specific config under servletname-servlet.xml for each servlet context.