Hmm, it should not be taking this much time unless you're running into an edge case - we have a fairly complex application that needs to pre-load a lot of data from persistence (no EFC though, it's an embedded DB) and over the wire at startup, and it still takes 15 seconds on a rainy day, mostly waiting for requests to finish. If you can gather a profile it will likely shed some light on why this takes place. Worst case, if you have a repro, it's worth to file an issue at https://github.com/dotnet/efcore. When you have time that is.