Hi Walter,
JSP works in the below way, browser asks for a JSP, then the JSP engine first checks to see whether it needs to compile the page. If the page has never been compiled, or if the JSP has been modified since it was last compiled, the JSP engine compiles the page.
Below are the steps of jsp compilation
Parsing the JSP
JSP into a servlet
Compiling the servlet
I am not able to understand about your restart of App Server and compilation.
Thanks,
Hamendra