1.10 feature freeze is going to be in the next few weeks. after that it will be a few months depending on how much is required to fix all the bugs that have probably been introduced. 1.9 mostly doesn't shorten loading times (although weak dependencies end up helping a bit). 1.10 has had a bunch of load time optimization which became a lot more obvious once 1.9 got rid of all the stupid stuff. the exact speedups are package dependent, but 2x is a good estimate. some packages get a lot more, some are about the same.