Excessive application boot time

Hi.

We are having some issues with an application using almost 3 minutes to boot up after launch. I started by checking the logs for any errors but found only one entry: EPiServer.Packaging.Storage.StateStorage: There are more than one record in StorageUpdateEntity data store for server with id xxx. Extra records will be deleted.

Since this probably isnt the issue I changed loglevel to "ALL" and tried to look for anything suspicious. One of the things I found was that for a period of ~50 seconds the application seem to do nothing but open and close SQL connections:

2021-01-22 08:01:38,866 [1] TRACE EPiServer.Data.Providers.Internal.SqlDatabaseExecutor: Opening a new transaction-less connection
2021-01-22 08:01:38,866 [1] TRACE EPiServer.Data.Providers.Internal.ConnectionContext: Opening Connection
2021-01-22 08:01:39,025 [1] TRACE EPiServer.Data.Providers.Internal.ConnectionContext: Closing Connection
2021-01-22 08:01:39,025 [1] TRACE EPiServer.Data.Providers.Internal.SqlDatabaseExecutor: Opening a new transaction-less connection
2021-01-22 08:01:39,026 [1] TRACE EPiServer.Data.Providers.Internal.ConnectionContext: Opening Connection
2021-01-22 08:01:39,172 [1] TRACE EPiServer.Data.Providers.Internal.ConnectionContext: Closing Connection
.. omitted
2021-01-22 08:02:28,460 [1] TRACE EPiServer.Data.Providers.Internal.SqlDatabaseExecutor: Opening a new transaction-less connection
2021-01-22 08:02:28,460 [1] TRACE EPiServer.Data.Providers.Internal.ConnectionContext: Opening Connection
2021-01-22 08:02:28,601 [1] TRACE EPiServer.Data.Providers.Internal.ConnectionContext: Closing Connection

I am wondering if anyone can tell me what is going on here? Or give suggestions on how I can figure out what is causing this absurd startup time. 

Any and all input welcome!