I have been using Hibernate since January 2011, but more recently I am integrating things into some UI. For some context I have an application that deals with libraries of colors.

Our current application stores the libraries in XML files under Castor on the local file system. A given library has 2,000 colors in it and takes maybe 200 ms to load.

My JPA framework looks something like

@Entity Library - m2m - @Entity Color - m2m - @Entity Representation (i.e. L*a*b*)

In my application, loading from a PostgreSQL database via Hibernate the same data takes

1. 20 seconds to load with full logging enabled
2. 16 seconds to load with logging disabled
3. 4 seconds to reload a second time (probably due the default caching behavior)
4. 0.2 seconds from via SQL from PostgreSQL
   
5. 0.2 seconds to load from Castor
   
6. 0 seconds (usually) if I use SoftReferences to cache the data in memory

Some of my questions are:

1. Is the performance I am seeing typical? Is it what most people would agree to expect from using Hibernate with a DBMS like PostgreSQL?
2. When logging is turned on, I see what looks like an obscene amount of SQL produced for only 2,000 colors. When logging is turned off, 16 seconds still seems like an awfully long time to load 2,000 color representations, where running an SQL query to extract the same data takes 203 ms.
3. What exactly is taking so long? Using Hibernate I basically load the library object, then iterate over all the colors it has, then for each color object I get the representation object and load the L*a*b* data into the UI.
4. Am I making some lame newbie mistake somewhere, and what would that mistake be?
5. Should I be formulating an appropriate HQL statement, similar to my SQL statement, and loading things that way?
6. Is there some documentation on using Hibernate with Graphical User Interfaces, or some best practices documentation somewhere?
   

Cheers, Eric