load-on-startup is an element that appears inside <servlet> tag in web.xml.4 years back load-on-startup was a very popular servlet interview question because not many Java J2EE developer was familiar with this element and how load-on-startup works inside a servlet container like tomcat or WebSphere. In this J2EE Tutorial, we will see what is a load on startup, how to use the load-on-startup element, and what are different values we can configure for load-On-Startup inside web.xml.