While playing around with what components could, and could not, be deleted from the JBoss deploy directory and still have a working server, I eventually found that almost all of the built-in components can be eliminated.

Of course, your results may vary depending on your site architecture and other server-side technologies you’re using, but when I’m deploying just ColdFusion WAR/EAR files on JBoss, the only required directory is jbossweb-tomcat50.sar. I could delete all other files and directories from deploy. This has a good side effect of decreasing the deploy time from almost 2 minutes to ~20 seconds (on my system). Not a huge difference, but it’s always nice to streamline your deployment.

In addition, I was able to eliminate all of the JAR files from the jboss\client directory and most JAR files from server\default\lib (keeping only jboss, mail and logging JARs). No huge gains here other than saving some disk space.

Bottom line, don’t be afraid to streamline your server. Eliminate unneeded components, JAR files, archives and configuration files to have a clean, efficient deployment.