I watched my Dragon initialization time drag by this morning and wondered what factors drove the overall time. Some time to load the vocabuary, some time to load the commands, and some time to do other things (what things?).

 

It seems to me that when Dragon slows down (shutting down Chrome always helps), rebooting Dragon seems to help, even with the same profile.

 

Does anyone have thoughts on how I could speed up my Dragon initialization time?

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Win10/11/x64, AMD Ryzen 7 3700X/3950X, 64/128GB RAM, Dragon 15.3, SP 7 Standard, SpeechStart, Office 365, KB 2017, Dragon Capture, Samson Meteor USB Desk Mic, Amazon YUWAKAYI headset, Klim and JUKSTG earbuds with microphones, excellent Sareville Wireless Mono Headset, 3 BenQ 2560x1440 monitors, Microsoft Sculpt Keyboard and Logitech G502 awesome gaming mouse.

Look at your Dragon log file, and start computing time deltas.

Let's share analysis scripts.


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DPG15.6 (also DPI 15.3) + KB, Sennheiser MB Pro 1 UC ML, BTD 800 dongle, Windows 10 Pro, MS Surface Book 3, Intel Core i7-1065G7 CPU @ 1.3/1.5GHz (4 cores, 8 logical, GPU=NVIDIA Quadro RTX 3000 with Max-Q Design.

 

"Other things" amounts to running the audio Wizard in the background. There's not much you can do about that.

Other than that, unless you want to do a complete search of your computer (which would amount to searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack), you have already found the solution. Restart Dragon every now and then. Enjoy the three minute break it gives you, it will clear up your thought processes and you will be much faster afterwards.

Hope that helps, Stephan

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www.egs-vertrieb.de - www.spracherkennungscloud.de

At the behest of Ag, I went in search of my Dragon.log file at C:\ProgramData\Nuance\NaturallySpeaking15\logs\me\dragon.log. It was 25MB in size, mostly filled with tens of thousands of CommandRobot error messages (can't find an RPC server that is looking for). I made another post about that; Lindsay showed me how to delete the log file years ago, but I keep forgetting to delete it as a part of regular maintenance.

I found a couple of error messages complaining about no read access to C:\ProgramData\Nuance\NaturallySpeaking15\[Data, User] folders, so I removed the read-only properties on the folders themselves, but that did nothing. I found a dozen SetList failed operations (posted on another thread), but they are not slowing the boot time down.

I did find a line in the log that said it took 14 seconds to load the "compatibility modules," whatever they are. Maybe for Office Apps? I have disabled all commands for Office apps except for Word - turning that one off kills the utility of Dragon in word, even for me (and I have several hundred custom Word commands for things). Anyhow, the CM compatibility modules take 14 or 15 seconds. Does anyone know how to disable them? I'm hoping the 15 seconds is not just for Word alone! :-)

2022-05-21|19:06:18.275| LEGACY|27060|13556|I|LOG (Perf): Time to add CM support for {dd100203-6205-11cf-ae61-0000e8a28647} = 2066 msec
2022-05-21|19:06:18.283| LEGACY|27060|23276|I|LOG (Perf): Loading of compatibility modules took 14496 msec

I timed the initialization boot time on my machine (tons of CPU and memory available) for a fresh profile and my normal profile (250 custom commands, probably a few hundred custom words and phrases). I also timed the main profile with Google open with 60 tabs. The timings show not much difference at all among any of those combinations. In all cases, Word, Outlook, and Excel were closed. And these timings were done with a new log file 100kb in size.)

00:00 Go!
00:25 Initializing... message appears (in all scenarios, between 23 and 25 seconds)
00:30 Completed (blue ready button shows for the fresh profile)

00:41 Completed (blue ready button shows for my main profile, so 10 seconds to load my commands and vocabulary)
00:33 Completed (blue ready button shows for my main profile after shutting down and redoing the line above. 8 seconds faster. Why? I don't know.)

00:35 Completed (blue ready button shows for main profile plus Google open with 60 tabs; Google made no difference at all)



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Win10/11/x64, AMD Ryzen 7 3700X/3950X, 64/128GB RAM, Dragon 15.3, SP 7 Standard, SpeechStart, Office 365, KB 2017, Dragon Capture, Samson Meteor USB Desk Mic, Amazon YUWAKAYI headset, Klim and JUKSTG earbuds with microphones, excellent Sareville Wireless Mono Headset, 3 BenQ 2560x1440 monitors, Microsoft Sculpt Keyboard and Logitech G502 awesome gaming mouse.

Quite honestly, this is not the first time that I get the impression that you must be doing something fundamentally wrong. Rather than going into all the details you are posting now, just two thoughts.

As I'm in the process of creating a new Dragon add-in which requires shutting down and restarting Dragon after each new compile and build, so as to reload the DLL holding the add-in, I typically restart Dragon dozens of times a day, if not a hundred times or more, for when my day job doesn't get in the way. The entire process of starting and loading a profile thus getting Dragon ready to respond takes about 10 seconds on my machine.

As you have mentioned your Dragon log file growing to 25 MB in size in another thread, that's another oddity in my book. For many years, the overall size of the Dragon log file seems to limited to 10,241 kB, and once that limit is hit, a new one is started.

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As I have mentioned in other threads on this forum, there was a time that I was plagued by Dragon startup of 5 to 15 minutes.

It turned out that it was largely related to having recently imported a Dragon profile that had been saved as XML.

Startup has been much more tolerable since then. But certainly not the 10 seconds that Rudiger reports.

I doubt that KKKWJ as being importing XML profiles as often as I was.

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DPG15.6 (also DPI 15.3) + KB, Sennheiser MB Pro 1 UC ML, BTD 800 dongle, Windows 10 Pro, MS Surface Book 3, Intel Core i7-1065G7 CPU @ 1.3/1.5GHz (4 cores, 8 logical, GPU=NVIDIA Quadro RTX 3000 with Max-Q Design.

AG, just for the record, you actually don't import Dragon profiles as XML. You may be importing previously exported custom words in XML format, but definitely not user profiles. Let's get into the habit of being more precise as far as terminology and overall observations, I would suggest. (And possibly getting a less verbose and more informative instead. It seems like the effect has already worn off to Kevin by now :-))

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RW, I would love to have a 10-second dragon startup time! (But I've never seen that, as far as I can remember. It has always been up in the 20-30 second range for me.) I would also love to find out what I'm doing that is "fundamentally wrong." Perhaps you could be a bit more precise in your term "fundamentally wrong." What exactly do you mean by it? What visions do you have behind the phrase?

I install Dragon, create a new profile from time to time out of frustration or need, import my couple of hundred simple script commands (most are 10 lines or so) and custom vocabulary (a few hundred words), save the new profile, and that's it. That's the "fundamental" process I have used for years. I use the same profile for many months until I am forced to start over because of awful performance.

The 32Mb files are caused by the SpeechStart CommandRobot.exe RPC error messages (and have done so for years), and there's not much I can do about them if I want the "restart dragon" and "microphone on" functionality from SS. How do you start dragon by voice and turn the microphone on by voice? Maybe I can use your methods, avoid the SS CommandRobot.exe errors, and get 10-second startup times - I would love to do that! (Maybe I need to upgrade to DPG like others have suggested.)


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Win10/11/x64, AMD Ryzen 7 3700X/3950X, 64/128GB RAM, Dragon 15.3, SP 7 Standard, SpeechStart, Office 365, KB 2017, Dragon Capture, Samson Meteor USB Desk Mic, Amazon YUWAKAYI headset, Klim and JUKSTG earbuds with microphones, excellent Sareville Wireless Mono Headset, 3 BenQ 2560x1440 monitors, Microsoft Sculpt Keyboard and Logitech G502 awesome gaming mouse.

 

Is that 10 seconds from a no user loaded state(with NatSpeak loaded) to an open user state or 10 seconds from no trace of Dragon to fully up and running with user loaded?

 

I believe I said to you several years ago Kevin but I was happy to connect up to your system to find out why this is happening, the offer still stands. However speechstart will not have anything to do with initialisation time for Dragon. 

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I wait ten seconds and say "wake up".

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