Sedna SP3.  I'm on a 2 CPU development server, 4G RAM, I'm the only user.  It takes 30 to 33 seconds to go from click the desktop icon to the basic framework is displayed and then 8 to 10 seconds to get the channels displayed.  This is all OOTB stuff.

Do these kind of timings fall in line with what you see?  Have you found any specific bottlenecks that in your past experience that I might want to look at?

Just seems a tad slower that I had hoped.

to run P6 effectivley you need:

Dual core processor (not 2 cpus - you need a dual core, because of some thread queuing issues)
2 GB RAM, minimum; i'd recommend 4 GB

Also, try upgrading to SP5 or SP6 - Pivotal have been working hard at improving performance changing the way the smartclient connects to the PBS and smartclient framework.

you'll also find that if you run Vista, W7 as client workstations, they'll load the smart client faster than XP because of the way the OS preloads a whole bunch of components that P6 relies on.

Using W2008 vs W2003 is also a big performance booster - I've heard that tests show W2008 is has roughly 25% better perforamce using like for like hardware - only the OS changed.

Note: I'd still stay away from 64-bit servers (except for database) because Pivotal runs on those serves in 32=bit emulation mode; why run an app in 32 bit mode on a 64 bit server - wheres the advantage in that? All i see are hassles because of the fact that the interaction between 32 bit emulation and 64bit backend can cause problems.....

We were originally going to use a 64-bit system as well, but were very strongly advised against it by CDC and ended up going with 32-bit.  We were also going to run it on Server 2008 and were also advised against that, so it is on 2003 R2.  The only thing in our Pivotal environment on 64 bit is the database server.  I am not sure about any benefit to using Visual Studio in the 64-bit environment, but I don't notice any performance issues with Visual Studio on the 32-bit server.  As for time to load - the client (SP6) takes about 22 seconds to load if the COM+ Application is already running and about an extra 10 seconds if it is not.  Portal Pages take a while longer than that, but we are probably not going to use those much, if at all.