[cturner]

Is part of this an experience of cygwin? Forking is slow under cygwin. If you can get to a recent Windows 10 with local admin rights, you can install windows-services for linux, and bash should perform well even on ten-year-old hardware.

If you getting unusual slowness in linux/BSD, some things to check: (1) any significant overhead on the system that could be making forking slow; (2) some option in your $HOME/.bashrc that is adding latency, e.g., indexing options or dynamic stuff in your PS1; (3) unusual filesystem stuff, e.g., your home directory is mounted over NFS.

If you're in linux and it is reproducible, run strace against a bash launch, and ctrl+c it when it gets stuck. Have a look at the recent system calls.

[portlander12345]

This is on Mac OS. I might try the tracing idea though.