One of the interesting things I’ve had to work with on my Grails project is compilation. Occasionally, I’ll get a .groovy file that seems to put Grails into an endless ‘compile-load-restart’ loop. To discover which file is the culprit, I physically stop the server after the compilation, but before the restart, and then go into $HOME/.grails/<VERSION>/<Project_Name>/classes/ and look to see which file was most recently compiled.
This tells me a little about what’s going on, and I was able to remove the .groovy file in this case to stop the endless restarting.