Watson Studio Very Slow - ibm-cloud

Question

I am using jupyter notebook on Watson Studio and installing python libraries is taking very long time.
for example the following lines of code would take like half an hour to get executed :
!conda install -c conda-forge geopy --yes
from geopy.geocoders import Nominatim # module to convert an address into latitude and longitude values
# libraries for displaying images
from IPython.display import Image
from IPython.core.display import HTML
# tranforming json file into a pandas dataframe library
from pandas.io.json import json_normalize
!conda install -c conda-forge folium=0.5.0 --yes
import folium # plotting library
What causes this ?

Answer 1

pip install folium
The root conda environment where you install the custom package must be very complex indeed (the price you pay for universal coverage to cater to needs of many users), and conda is particularly slow installer, as it makes a lot of I/O operations (even on NVMe drives it is so slow as you observe).
This is why Kaggle (and us) have switched to pip for all but a few of python packages, and so should you (if possible to find your package on PyPI - or at least on GitHub).
Try also to unpin the old version of the library you wanted to use (released nearly three years ago!) and use the latest one - much fewer packages will need to be reinstalled if you use the latest version:
So use:
pip install folium==0.11.0
or simply:
pip install folium