Code layout influences application startup performance, yet remains difficult to optimize due to dynamic and workload-dependent execution behavior. Poor method placement degrades instruction cache utilization and increases page faults, effects that are especially pronounced in latency-sensitive systems. Existing approaches based on static analysis or frequency-driven profiling often fail to capture the temporal structure of execution during startup.

We introduce Temporal Code Layout (TCL), a code placement strategy for GraalVM Native Image that reduces startup latency by exploiting the chronological order of method first invocation. Using lightweight timestamping instrumentation in GraalIR, we record first-call events during profiling and arrange methods according to their execution order. Experimental results show consistent improvements in time to first response by reducing instruction cache misses and page faults during early execution.