After playing around with some VM settings in my GlassFish 3.1.1 environment (development and productive) I came to a setup which brings up my glassfish server much faster. Here are my settings
Development (3GB RAM)
-client
-XX:+AggressiveHeap
-Xmx1024m
-Xms1024m
-Xss128k
-XX:+DisableExplicitGC
Productiv (4GB Ram)
-server
-XX:+AggressiveHeap
-Xmx2048m
-Xms2048m
-Xss128k
-XX:+DisableExplicitGC
Here is also a useful link for further performance settings: