A prewarm function is designed to improve the startup time for individual jobs by preloading necessary resources, such as models or plugins, before any jobs are assigned to a worker process. However, it can add time to the initial worker process startup because resources are loaded upfront during this phase. For example, if you are preloading a model like Voice Activity Detection (VAD) in the prewarm function, this will take time during the worker initialization. While this upfront cost exists, the primary purpose of prewarm functions is to reduce the startup time for subsequent jobs by ensuring that the required resources are already loaded. If you are experiencing slower startup times overall, it might be worth reviewing what is being preloaded in the prewarm function and optimizing it to ensure only essential resources are included. Sources: Worker options | LiveKit Docs | Silero VAD plugin | LiveKit Docs | agent/main.py | External data and RAG | LiveKit Docs