Why Did My Java WAR File Balloon to 2GB? A Cautionary Tale of Hidden JDKs and Game Files

Over a decade ago I helped a client upgrade a Java project and discovered the WAR file was nearly 2 GB.

Inside the massive archive were two unexpected installation packages: JDK 1.4 and the game PES 2006, which had been mistakenly committed to SVN and later slipped into production, causing long deployment times on WebSphere.

The incident was traced back to a night when developers, bored after overtime, uploaded the game to SVN as a joke, never deleting it, allowing it to hide in the WAR for almost a year.

Later, a new female developer joined the team, unfamiliar with proper Java project setup. She was assigned a Spring‑Maven project but claimed the framework was not ready, leading to confusion and delays.

When her code was reviewed, I found Chinese pinyin class and variable names, missing reusable methods, custom annotations, and a lack of camel‑case naming. Database tables mixed uppercase, lowercase, and camel case, and she even named dimensions with “long_rice” and “high_rice”, insisting “rice” meant meters.

The experience highlighted the importance of proper environment configuration, consistent naming conventions, and thorough code reviews to avoid such chaos.