Starting a Virtuoso server process takes a few seconds. Making a new graph takes no time beyond the time to insert the triples into it. Once the server process(es) are running, all the data is online.

With high-traffic applications, reaching cruising speed may sometimes take a long time, specially if the load is random-access intensive. Filling gigabytes of RAM with cached disk pages takes a long time if done a page at a time. To alleviate this, Virtuoso pre-reads 2MB-sized extents instead of single pages if there is repeated access to the same extent within a short time. Thus cache warm-up times are shortened.