Maybe you remember the problems we had with a custom page in Japan loading it from TRIUMF. It took almost one minute since each RPC request took 
about 1s round-trip. This got fixed by the modb* scheme where the framework actually collects all ODB variables in a custom page and puts them 
into ONE rpc request (making the path an actual array of paths). That reduced the requests from 100 to 1 in the above example. Maybe the same 
could be done in your current case. Pulling one ODB variable at a time is not very efficient.

Stefan