Interesting.
I just timed my startup times and from hitting enter until the program is loaded (my base directory does not conain any images) takes 3 seconds. I tried with a filled cache and an empty one, same result.
Having a small cache size might come into play as well I think. If you start inside a directory that contains many images and your Maximum number of cache entries is set lower then the amount of images in that directory you will see a performance hit.
darktable takes about the same time to load here and “a lot” longer when it needs to do some db cleaning/updating.
This is on a Linux machine (Debian) and my machine isn’t a powerhouse (rough specs)