Gemini CLI takes up to 39 seconds to load on Windows

[doggy8088]

What happened?

The wait is far too long.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/d31fc4d7-62bf-4281-b131-ac7c4b6fbe2c

What did you expect to happen?

In Linux, it took only 7 seconds.

I expected the loading time to be within 10 seconds on Windows.

Client information

Client Information

Run gemini to enter the interactive CLI, then run the /about command.

> /about
╭─────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
│                                                 │
│ About Gemini CLI                                │
│                                                 │
│ CLI Version     0.9.0                           │
│ Git Commit      a93d92a3                        │
│ Model           gemini-2.5-pro                  │
│ Sandbox         no sandbox                      │
│ OS              win32                           │
│ Auth Method     OAuth                           │
│                                                 │
╰─────────────────────────────────────────────────╯

Login information

Google Account

Anything else we need to know?

No response

[megha1188]

The significant delay you're seeing with Gemini CLI on Windows happens before its main application code (start.js) even begins to run. This is due to the "cold start" overhead inherent in any non-trivial Node.js application.

Before your script is executed, Node.js performs several time-consuming steps:

1. Process and Runtime Setup: The operating system creates a node process, and the Node.js runtime initializes its core components, including the V8 JavaScript engine and the event loop.
2. Recursive Module Loading: The most significant delay comes from Node.js having to find, read, and parse all required modules and their dependencies from the node_modules directory. For a large project like Gemini CLI with hundreds of dependencies, this involves a massive number of file system operations, which is notably slower on Windows compared to Linux.

In short, the startup time is largely a fixed cost of the Node.js runtime preparing the environment and loading the extensive dependencies of the Gemini CLI, all of which happens before the tool's own logic starts executing.

I tried running the gemini in windows and it takes 16-18 seconds for me start up gemini.

[doggy8088]

As far as I know, Claude Code recently switched to using Bun to compile into a single executable file ( Source here ). I wonder if Gemini CLI is also considering doing the same?

[JuanCS-Dev]

/assign

[gemini-cli[bot]]

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[gbks121]

Running gemini cli through cmd.exe is much faster than PowerShell. The issue is with PowerShell's handling of the gemini.cmd wrapper, not the Gemini CLI itself.

PowerShell executes .cmd files by spawning cmd.exe as a child process with additional overhead for script parsing, security checks, and I/O redirection. Direct node execution or using cmd.exe directly bypasses this overhead.

The way I have addressed this issue is by Creating a function in my PowerShell profile that calls node directly:

function gemini {
    & node "%APPDATA%\Roaming\npm\node_modules\@google\gemini-cli\dist\index.js" @args
}

This workaround has solved the issue for me.

[doggy8088]

@gbks121 I tried this, but the launch still took very long time.

node "C:\Program Files\nodejs/node_modules/@google/gemini-cli/dist/index.js"