I’ve been seeing 15-20s cold-start times for Anki after upgrading to 25.07.5 on Windows 11. Previously, the Anki app opened basically instantly after clicking the icon. Now, the Anki window only appears after this 15-20s startup time. Besides this startup time, Anki is performant like usual.
I’m not sure what version I was on previously (or if there’s a way I can check), but it must have been somewhat recent. My last upgrade prior to this couldn’t have been more than maybe 4 months ago.
I launched Anki via anki-console to see if I could glean some info. I noted that there is a long delay between launching anki-console and seeing the “Starting Anki 25.07.5…” message, and a similarly long delay between the “aqt.mediasrv: Serving on” message and the “Starting main loop…” message.
I say “cold-start” because if I immediately close and reopen, it opens up much more quickly (but still not so instantaneously like it used to). The startup time seems to get longer gradually as the time between launches increases.
I’m not seeing anybody else with the same issue on this forum, so I’m expecting this may be an issue with something local I’ll have to diagnose and fix. But I’m wondering if anybody would have any insights to help me diagnose the problem. I don’t know everything that is occurring between these log statements, so I’m not sure where to start looking.
Is your computer using an SSD or HDD? The old packaging method bundled up a bunch of Python files into a single file, which may have performed better on slower disks that need to seek to locate the data. If like most Windows users you are using an antivirus program, adding exceptions for Anki may also help.
I added these two directories to the list of exclusions and couldn’t notice any immediate improvement. Is there anything else I can try? Is there something I can do to help find out the bottleneck?
To be a bit more precise: for me, warm startup takes ~4s and cold startup takes ~12s. Before the upgrade, I think every startup was comparable to the current warm startup.
Given that on my system, cached startup is <25% faster than a cold start, an affected user will need to do some experimentation to figure out why their system is behaving differently. If you’re using add-ons, disabling them would be a good thing to test first.
The only possibly-related thing I can think of is that I’m going on the appearance of the Anki window, not when the cursor stops showing a busy icon, which takes a few extra seconds in either case. The cursor is misleading here - for some obscure technical reasons, Windows can end up showing it for a little while after app startup has already completed.
That’s to be expected. For a test to give useful information, you need to wait for any post-startup tasks to finish running first.