In a distributed application execution system having a plurality of application servers, each application server has volatile and nonvolatile storage as well as computational resources for executing applications as follows. A plurality of applications is stored in non-volatile storage. At least one such application is a primed application which is derived as follows. An unprimed application is executed and an initialization signal is optionally communicated to the unprimed application. A status signal is obtained from the unprimed application. Upon receipt of the status signal, the unprimed application is checkpointed to produce the primed application, and the primed application is stored. A request to execute the primed application is received from a client system. In response to the request, the primed application is loaded from non-volatile storage into volatile storage, and the primed application is executed. The primed application returns a result to the request to the client system.