How does enabling lazy initialization affect the startup time of a Spring Boot application?

Enabling lazy initialization in a Spring Boot application slightly increases the startup time. Lazy initialization means that beans are only created when they are first requested, rather than at application startup. While this can save memory and improve startup times for large applications, there is a small performance penalty when the bean is first used, as it has to be created on-demand. Therefore, enabling lazy initialization can slightly increase the startup time due to the overhead of creating beans when they are needed.