last time I tested it needed to fetch the whole db to do even the most basic reads, so even simple but long running applications had a very long, network intensive initialization time. is that still the case?
OrbitDB works with a CRDT stored in IPFS. In order to calculate the state of the database, it does need to reduce the CRDT oplog which requires fetching all the entries. This was indeed very time consuming, particularly for remote requests, since we used a "nexts" list of addresses to load.
HOWEVER! Our latest release, 0.23.0, mitigated this by using a power-of-2 skiplist to load things in parallel, which gave us a nice 4-5x boost there.
