JBoss is slow to start spending much time in catalina initialization

Issue

• Our JBoss server is slow to start. We can specifically see that it is slow during the catalina initialization of JBoss Web as evident from these log lines:

  INFO  [org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11AprProtocol] Initializing Coyote HTTP/1.1 on http-0.0.0.0-8080
  INFO  [org.apache.coyote.ajp.AjpAprProtocol] Initializing Coyote AJP/1.3 on ajp-0.0.0.0-8009
  INFO  [org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina] Initialization processed in 30728 ms
  

• Thread dumps show the main thread in the following code:

  "main" prio=1 tid=0x0000000049c896c0 nid=0x3185 runnable [0x0000000040f2e000..0x0000000040f32d10]
      at org.apache.tomcat.jni.SSL.initialize(Native Method)
      at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
      at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39)
      at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25)
      at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:585)
      at org.apache.catalina.core.AprLifecycleListener.initializeSSL(AprLifecycleListener.java:220)
      - locked <0x00002b0f556f6d60> (a java.lang.Class)
      at org.apache.catalina.core.AprLifecycleListener.lifecycleEvent(AprLifecycleListener.java:84)
      at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleSupport.fireLifecycleEvent(LifecycleSupport.java:117)
      at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardServer.initialize(StandardServer.java:767)
      at org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina.load(Catalina.java:518)
      at org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina.start(Catalina.java:558)