extremely long boot time

[flames]

Hello,
since ever i had a very long boot time, speaking about 8-10 minutes!
always i thought it was the hardware or some limitations from virtualization. Since i use mostly commodity HW and ProxmoxVE, i thought it was an issue with old Xeon 2690v3 (2.6GHz base / 3.50 GHz turbo) because of low frequency... now OPNS is running on a dual Epyc 7252 (3.1GHz base / 3.2GHz turbo) and has 256GB of DDR4 RAM physically (to mitigate the slow reboot i tested how it is going on a supemicro server), it is still booting slowly as og 8-10mintes!
In my case OPNS is only managing 73 VLANs and 85 IPsec tunnels.
nothing changed actually. so i assume it was not the PVE virtualization and not the old Xeon cpu.
Asking for ideas and advices, where to look. it is not about the network speed, it is about the boot time. thanks in advance!

[flames]

forgot to mention, please consider: boot time in my measurings is NOT hardware boot, but up from the OPNS/BSD bootloader timeout. my OPNS is always hanging on "Configuring firewal..." for 5-6 minutes, then goes again with the interaface list, then hanging again on "configuring firewall..." for another 2-3 minutes.