One of the things that is slow and not optimized well about our inital alingment is the lock of the laser to the Xarm. This is not a hard problem, just one that we have never taken the time to work on. This was one of the problems (annoyances) that the relocking team ran into this afternoon. I had a look at the data from a sucsessfull acquisition, and can see two problems that have simple solutions.
1) It takes too long to ramp down the feedback from the IMC locking loop. We have a 3 second pause and a 2 second ramp on this gain. While both loops are on, they fight each other and the lock is unstable (see attached screenshot). I would suggest something like a half second for each of these, or even less.
2)We had a 0.1 second delay on the FM triggering that turns on boosts. The other day I had reduced this from 0.2, but it is still too long. We should probably try a shorter FM delay or no delay.