problem on training(first epoch take a long time more than 4 hours )using colab and fastai

Question

I have a problem on training (first epoch takes a long time more than 4 hours) using colab and fastai. It takes me about 5 hours only for the first epoch which is not useful using google colab because the limitation using of GPU I'm using 'efficientnet-b4' and about 52k training photos after data augmentation and 11k valid photos.

The problem is shown on the photo:

Answer 1

Colab takes alot of time fetching the data from google drive as it is not indexed efficiently and thus makes the first epoch very long. For large datasets, I would recommend using google cloud storage and importing data from there.