faster loading/startup

[iainc.dev]

Are there any suggestions/guidelines/best-practice blog/document for

a) identifying what's causing the *initial* startup of my smartgwt application to take a fairly long time (eg 30 seconds)?
b) fixing it.

(This problem does not appear if the user attempts to log in a second time -- presumably, the browser has cached a lot. Also, we're ussing tomcat for j2ee and Apache httpd for front-end http pages. )

Related to this, is there any document/blog you could point me to that would show how I can create some sort of "splash" screen while the SmartGWT application loads up so that I can distract and inform a user while the application loads? (Based on the documentation, I believe that "background loading using "image" tags are somehow meant to be used, but any examples/documentation would very much help.)

Other irrelevant, here's my standard additional background info:
======================
SmartGWT (not smartclient) Version: SmartClient Version: v8.3p_2012-11-26/PowerEdition Deployment (built 2012-11-26)
...
Browser: Chrome on Win 7
GWT SDK: 2.5.0rc2
Sun JDK 1.6.0_13
J2EE: Tomcat 6
OS: Centos 6.x
IDE: MyEclipse 10.6 with Google Plugin for Eclipse (3.1.0)

[Blama]

What a coincidence. Please check my just written how-to here.

Best regards,
Blama

[Isomorphic]

The guide Blama just posted is a good one to look at.

You can also lift the code from the SmartGWT Showcase .html file to display a simple centered message and animated .gif while files are loading.

Also, you should use a tool such as Firebug to see what's taking time. It may not actually be network load time, or the files that are taking a while to load may not be the ones you expect.