I ran the py-spy profiler like this:

sudo uvx py-spy record -o /tmp/profile.svg -- llm --help

Here's that profile: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2025/llm-apr-23-profile.svg

Notable:

https://github.com/simonw/llm-mlx and https://github.com/simonw/llm-sentence-transformers are both doing something expensive!