spacy caching explanation needed

[saraswat40]

I have a very simple program:

import time
import spacy

start = time.time()
nlp = spacy.load('en_core_web_lg', disable=['tagger', 'ner', 'textcat', '...'])
print(time.time() - start)

The first time I run this I get this output:

# python3 test.py 
183.59882807731628

The second time I run this I get this:

# python3 test.py 
1.3441166877746582

Obviously some sort of caching is happening. Is there an explanation for this somewhere?

My real problem is that I have multiple threads accessing a file like this. For the first invocation, they all get stuck trying to load spacy. My solution is to create a lockfile and the lock acquirer will load spacy and rest of them will wait and use the cache mentioned above. Is there a better way to do this?

Thanks

[polm]

Moving to discussions because this is a question and not a bug report...