Here is the performance test i am looking at. I have 8 different entities that are table per type. Some of the entities contain over 100 thousand rows.

This particular application does several recursive calculations on the client so I think it may be best to preload the data instead of lazy loading.

If there are no associations I can load the entire database in about 3 seconds. As I add associations in any way the performance starts to drastically decline.

I am loading all the data the same way (just calling toList() on the entity attached to the context). I ran the test with edmx generated classes and self tracking entities and had similar results.

I am sure if I were to try and deal with the associations myself, similar to how I would in a dataset, the performance problem would go away. On the other hand I am pretty sure this is not how the entity framework was intended to being used. Any thoughts or ideas?