If it is reassuring, I just opened your app (from U.S.; got the gke branch), and it launched super fast and everything worked. That is a super cool app!
The bumpy time due to build and launch isn’t anything you can address. The MyBinder team has been performing a lot of behind-the-scenes updating and migration of MyBinder the last couple of weeks. Everytime the cached images get wiped, they have to be rebuilt on the next launch and propagated out to the nodes in the cluster. And then as other branches in the federation get addressed, the same process happens there.
See:
- https://twitter.com/mybinderteam/status/1309022792105558016
- recent discourse post about build & launch times
- https://twitter.com/mybinderteam/status/1308721150726492160
- https://twitter.com/mybinderteam/status/1308719841520517120
- https://twitter.com/mybinderteam/status/1305771888057167873
- https://twitter.com/mybinderteam/status/1301439464787542016
Hopefully, you’ll have less of a bumpy time launching soon.