spacy.en.English() takes a very long time to load on a newly started EC2 instace

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I have a web service that provides data, including some NLP analysis, for some internal tools at work. The first time a new EC2 instance is launched, the spacy.en.English() command takes a very long time to load - on the order of about 15 minutes. This only happens once. If I restart the EC2 instance, it loads as expected (10-20 seconds). This only happens the first time the EC2 instance is loaded after launching from an AMI (which already has spacy installed, downloaded, etc). I can't really think of why this would be unless it was trying to redownload something automatically. The CPU usage during this call is usually hovering at around 1%, while during normal operation, it blazes through at around 98%. Any ideas or suggestions on where to look? I'm trying to create auto-scaling groups, but thats really hard to do if it takes so long to start up a brand new instance.

Your Environment

• Operating System: Linux version 4.4.51-40.58.amzn1.x86_64 (mockbuild@gobi-build-64011) (gcc version 4.8.3 20140911 (Red Hat 4.8.3-9) (GCC) ) failed on build #1 SMP Tue Feb 28 21:57:17 UTC 2017
• Python Version Used: Python 2.7.12 (default, Sep 1 2016, 22:14:00)
• spaCy Version Used: 1.6.0

[ines]

We just pushed a new release that also comes with a smaller model that should take significantly less time to load (~50MB, about 2% less accurate than the larger model).

The small model is now the default model, so in 1.7.0, you can simply do:

python -m spacy download en # download small model (50MB)
python -m spacy download en_core_web_md # download medium model (1GB)

• Release notes for 1.7.0
• Models documentation
• Command line interface documentation

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