Optimizing Application Boot Times with Dockerfile Alterations

The article provides a solution to slow boot times in Elixir applications, a common issue when applications download and compile dependencies during startup. By adding a step to the Dockerfile to perform the download and compilation during the build process, these dependencies can be cached and, as a result, are instantly available at boot time, thus speeding up application startup. This is particularly useful for environments with multiple deployments or when using large dependencies like Machine Learning models. An environment check for 'EXS_DRY_RUN' can be added to determine if the application should halt or continue execution. For applications using Bumblebee and HuggingFace models, caching them during the Docker build process also eliminates the risk of boot failure if the model source is unreachable. This Dockerfile modification is valuable for achieving faster, more efficient, and reliable application deployments.