I've seen app load times this bad before (longer, actually, in the 15-20 min. range), on a VB6 fat client app that hit a central network db server. This was ac

I've seen app load times this bad before (longer, actually, in the 15-20 min. range), on a VB6 fat client app that hit a central network db server. This was actually indended to be an improvement. The app was meant to replace an existing point of sale system in a national chain of stores, but because the app was purchased by executives which no real understanding of what they were getting (and who browbeat anyone who tried to raise warning flags as being protective of their own fiefdoms) it had some architectural/programming warts which made it doomed to fail. For example, all clients were to use a central database, located at company HQ, typically over 128kbps links. The legacy system used servers in each store, with sales and inventory data being passed up incrementally, so the slow links weren't an issue. And the code base was terrible - littered with select * over tables with hundreds of columns just to fetch a couple fields. Because development had been so haphazard on the app, nobody wanted to remove fields from the db, just in case they were used someplace. And these selects happend all the time, like when you'd click a UI item and it'd fetch the relevant data on demand to populate stuff. There were tons of other issues, too - like being unable to handle most transactions without the network and db being available, integrity issues, etc. It was a mess. So, once it became clear that the app was gonna fall over entirely on deployment to more than about 10 clients, panic mode set in. After some guessing, the developers decided to cache data on startup. Hence the slow as fuck startup times as each client performed thousands of selects of hundreds of fields to get enough data to run. It actually helped, somewhat, though all of the other issues were enough to utterly doom the app and get the executive (CFO, I think) who bought it shown the door. A major US consulting firm came in and replaced it, costing craploads but actually delivering something usable.