Is possible to improve the activation time of a conda environment?

Question

First, please apologize if any mistake and the inconvenience. I'm new with conda and anaconda.

I'm struggling with the time that takes the activation of my conda environment (up to 10 seconds) - the 'activate' is slow.

Is the any way to make this timeless? Some people recommend using the root instead of the environment. I would like to keep using environments for the different needs of each project.

I'm using Windows 10 (Home - version 1607), 15.9GB usable RAM, 64-bits OS and x64 processor with Intel i7 2.00GHz CPU.

Current conda install:

           platform : win-64
      conda version : 4.3.21
   conda is private : False
  conda-env version : 4.3.21
conda-build version : 2.1.8
     python version : 3.5.2.final.0
   requests version : 2.12.4
   root environment : C:\Users\Antonio\Anaconda3  (writable)
default environment : C:\Users\Antonio\Anaconda3
   envs directories : C:\Users\Antonio\Anaconda3\envs
                      C:\Users\Antonio\AppData\Local\conda\conda\envs
                      C:\Users\Antonio\.conda\envs
      package cache : C:\Users\Antonio\Anaconda3\pkgs
                      C:\Users\Antonio\AppData\Local\conda\conda\pkgs
       channel URLs : https://conda.anaconda.org/conda-forge/win-64
                      https://conda.anaconda.org/conda-forge/noarch
                      https://conda.anaconda.org/intel/win-64
                      https://conda.anaconda.org/intel/noarch
                      https://repo.continuum.io/pkgs/free/win-64
                      https://repo.continuum.io/pkgs/free/noarch
                      https://repo.continuum.io/pkgs/r/win-64
                      https://repo.continuum.io/pkgs/r/noarch
                      https://repo.continuum.io/pkgs/pro/win-64
                      https://repo.continuum.io/pkgs/pro/noarch
                      https://repo.continuum.io/pkgs/msys2/win-64
                      https://repo.continuum.io/pkgs/msys2/noarch
        config file : C:\Users\Antonio\.condarc
         netrc file : None
       offline mode : False
         user-agent : conda/4.3.21 requests/2.12.4 CPython/3.5.2 Windows/10 Windows/10.0.14393
      administrator : False

Answer 1

I suspect that conda just does packages freshness check when it starts, over the internet.

In your condarc, try to set

auto_update_conda: False

If that does not help, also try

offline: True

(See the docs.)