Test Intitialisation Time Sensitive to Classpath Dependencies

My test is making use of JBoss AS7 remote deployment and takes 11+ seconds before any output is received by the AS instance. Test initialisation times appear to be sensitive to the number of classpath dependencies. Of this time:

2.5 seconds is spent loading auxiliary archives;

8 seconds is spent making the final internal in-memory deployment before sending a byte buffer over to AS7.

Inclusion of Arquillian persistence along with JMeter (which has many transitive dependencies) results in tests shipping with an arquillian-persistence.jar that is 9MiB in size. This JAR file is produced and compressed on the fly as part of the test EAR construction. The jar files are compressed again when added to the final EAR.

My typical usage scenario is to run a test from Eclipse which spawns a JVM each time so test runs are from standing start (little hotspot optimisation).

Some of the generated Arquillian jars include dependencies like log4j and slf4j which will be available in the target server. As far as I can tell, I have no control over this process.

It would be ideal if I could create an Arquillian module in AS7 to eliminate the need to ship Arquillian run time classes entirely.