@sphuber my branch was already based off of your branch. I’ve opened a draft pull request of the whole branch so you can look at the full scope of the changes.
However, I think it will not be useful to work on that directly since there are a lot of changes, and some of the more exploratory ones might not be needed in the end, and some of them might require further discussion (like jsonschema → fastjsonschema migration). Also some of the tests on this branch are failing and I wasn’t able to pinpoint which commit introduce the failures, another reason to start fresh.
I’ve submitted a first standalone PR with your commit and my follow up commits. Those are the most critical for speeding up aiida.orm and should go in first.