What was my suggestion that you tried?

The solution sounds like an old standard practice for games: Getting items from memory is fast, so the more you can pre-compute ahead of time, the better the performance will be once the important works gets going. I mentioned that I was willing to re-try a connection after a 5 second pause because my application took so long to start. That time is spent doing pretty much what you describe. It's calculating, setting up, creating objects, instantiating things, and so forth. So, I wouldn't call that a hack in any way, if that's what you're doing.

The one thing that I would be concerned about, in your case, is the time it is taking to open the connection, unless you feel that there's a good reason for that. Like I mentioned, I've never had to worry about that whether connecting over a LAN or connecting local. The delay I had to deal with was caused by the SQL Server listener starting up. After that, all my connections were effectively instantaneous.