I agree, OctoPrint is very slow to load with the default settings. I disabled these plugins and now it loads very quickly:
- Action Command Notification Support
- Action Command Prompt Support
- Announcements Plugin
- Anonymous Usage Tracking
- Discovery
- Error tracking
- File Check
- Firmware check
- Logging
- Pi Support Plugin
I second that fork [2]. It is very actively developed and it's already a huge improvement over the original project. But why do you have to build it? It has rpm and deb packages readily available.