Hi, I have no solution, actually I've just registered to open a very similar ticket, when saw yours.

According to my experiments getting an already running VM from the pool (times between events: CREATING - INIT_SCRIPTS_STARTED) can take anything between 5seconds and 5minutes. It's unclear why.

It's actually faster not to use the instance pools according to my experiments.

Additionally it would be great if at least the global ini scripts would be applied on the VMs when they are started in the pool (via that one could do some time consuming init steps independently of the job start).

Since you received no answer in a reltively long time, I guess one has to accept that it's just simply slow..... :'(