7-second EF startup time even for tiny DbContext

Question

I am trying to reduce the startup time of my EF-based application, but I find that I cannot reduce the amount of time taken for an initial read below 7 seconds even for a single

Answer 1

After taking the code your wrote putting it in its own project I found that the project's platform target had a great effect on the start up time of the EF framework.

When targeting an x64 platform, I received results similar to yours (7 second spin up on the first DbContext and <1 second on the second). When targeting x86 the spin up time for the first DbContext gets reduced by about 4 seconds down to 3.34633 seconds while the second DbContext takes a similar amount of time as in the x64 case.

I am not sure why this happens but it must have to do with how the Entity Framework initializes itself in different environments. I have posted a separate question about that here.