Why is speed up no option? - Yeah, SSDs are great. It's save x00.000€ (where x >= 1) in company I work for. - But also bottleneck and waste profiling while starting help us a lot. - Decide also raid0, raid5 or another raid levels to gain speed up. - Depends on technology here things like hotswap, jrebel, osgi or others. - Another thing is used DB. Maybe a memory DB is an option.

Without speedup there not so many options. - As already mentioned, test driven developing or like to reduce needness to start up - As you said, multitasking. It's doesn't work for me, if I try to do more work. But it's work if I do some not directly related tasks like writing mails, contribute to wiki pages, grooming, reading articles or HN.