OpenAI Whisper: occasionally doesn't start transcribing until restarting the computer

Question

I am using whisper to transcribe audio recordings. Sometimes, everything works well and the transcription proceeds relatively quickly but at other times, the same audio file won't start transcribing until I restart the command prompt or even more often - the computer.

When I run the transcription command (whisper xxx.mp3 --model large-v2 --language Ukrainian), I get no error, nothing, it seems to start running but no transcription appears, or sometimes, it appears but very-very slowly (like 20 seconds of transcription in 5 min).

When I reload the computer, the transcription usually works well again.

I checked the GPU performance when I run the transcription command and at both times (when the transcription works and when it doesn't), the dedicated GPU1 memory usage is 7.8 out of 8 GB while utilization is 0%.

When the transcription works well, the fans run quite loudly, but when it doesn't, they don't.

• GPU1 is NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060,
• GPU0 is Intel(R) Iris(R) Xe Graphics.
• OS - Windows 11 Home.
• processor - 12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-12500H.
• I have installed python 3.9.9, ffmpeg, and associated dependencies.

Has anyone had a similar issue?

P.S. I'm quite new to all this, so maybe there is something I do that is essentially wrong. So just in case, here is an example of how I would usually start:

python -m venv C:\Users\rusia\venv

venv\Scripts\activate.bat

whisper

whisper xxx.mp3 --model large-v2 --language xxx

Answer 1

Turning off "CUDA Sysmem Fallback" solved the issue.