As a webapp gets bigger the time it takes to boot also increases which is a serious factor contributing to decreased focus and productivity when programming. When running Tomcat with Eclipse, the web application may restart even for the most trivial changes incurring long pauses.
I found the following settings for Tomcat to minimize restarts while still picking up all changes:
[x] Serve modules without publishing
[ ] Publish module context to separate XML files
[x] Auto reloading enabled
George's Techblog 