I’d like to optimize Slicer to launch and display a volume as quickly as possible. The minimum functions I need are the intersecting multiplanar view, each slice view (red/green/yellow), and measurement calipers. Reformat and volume render are desirable but not necessary.
Which modules can I disable (in settings) to speed launching while preserving these functions?
Can Slicer be pre-launched and then triggered to open a data file from other software, rather than launching a new Slicer instance?
You can try disabling all modules and see how much startup time improvement can be achieved that way. You can also remove module shared libraries, that may make the startup a bit faster, but still most probably the startup time will be still about 5 seconds.
Yes, there are multiple extensions for Slicer that provide various server interfaces that can be used to trigger loading of a data set. You can probably use/slightly modify one of these: