Importing the DSPy library is very time consuming, what is this due to?Is it possible to optimize this problem?

[17Reset]

import time

start_time = time.time()
import dspy
print(f"load dspy time: {time.time() - start_time} s")

load dspy time: 5.986269474029541 s

[estsauver]

The long import time is mostly due to DSPy’s design choice to expose many features at the top level. The init.py file imports numerous subpackages and re‑exports their symbols so users can simply write import dspy and immediately access predictors, retrievers, adapters, and evaluation utilities. These subpackages import heavy dependencies—such as litellm, regex, numpy, and pandas—as soon as they’re loaded. This eager loading ensures everything is ready to use but means that importing DSPy pulls in a large dependency graph, making startup slower than a lightweight library.

[chenmoneygithub]

@17Reset Thanks for reporting the issue! We are aware of this, and in an effort of shrinking the memory/time consumption at importing time. In our incoming DSPy 3.0 release, we will ensure this runs much faster.

[17Reset]

Thanks for clearing up the confusion, and look for a better performing DSPy to arrive soon!

[TomeHirata]

Yes, we'll reduce dependencies and packages imported with import dspy in DSPy 3.0.

[saurabhkankriya]

@TomeHirata @chenmoneygithub @ I think we can close this issue since the load time has reduced significantly.

[TomeHirata]

Thank you for the report. Great to see the significant decline in the import time. Let me close this issue.

[AhmedAl93]

Hello @saurabhkankriya @TomeHirata

I'm still experiencing significant delays (45-54 seconds) when importing DSPy in my environment, as shown in the attached reproducible cases.

Environment details:

• Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS
• Python 3.10.11
• DSPy versions 3.0.0b1 and 3.0.0b2

This contrasts sharply with the reported ~0.7s import time in the closed issue.

[TomeHirata]

I've never experienced such a long delay. Can you profile your memory usage and also check what libraries are in your sys modules?

[AhmedAl93]

The problem was wider than just DSPy loading time (Even numpy took 4s to be imported).

The identified root causes:

• The project resides on a mounted Windows drive (/mnt/c/Users/...) via WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux).
• WSL’s filesystem translation layer introduces significant overhead for Python imports

So I moved my project to WSL's native filesystem (~/). And it was solved :)
Thank you for your help !