Yeah makes sense. I should have used my language more carefully: I have very little hands-on experience with entity framework, and thus don’t have objective reasons to say it has a “huge” memory footprint.

Does the startup time/CPU usage cost vary depending on the size of the dataset you’re interacting with?

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.

No. To be clear: I wasn’t trying to say it was bad. Just repeating what I had read in a (fairly old) .net book. Should have chosen my words more carefully.