How big is your application and how many ejbs are there? Typically, creation of EJB container and loading of EJBs does NOT take a lot of time.
Can you use a profiler? also if you add the jvm option: -Xloggc:<full path to a file>, then you can also see if GC is causing the delay. (You can tail -f the file on a separate terminal to see ongoing gc activity)
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