[dahart]

Yes, that happens all the time for me. And more often than not, it's because of all the crap I put in my startup scripts without realizing it until it gets too big. Sometimes it's the volume of crap other people have put in /etc/bashrc. Sometimes it's a slow filesystem causing one of the startup commands to hang a little. Sometimes it's a command that's just big and bloated.

It's instructive to dig in and debug it, you may be really surprised how much insane amounts of stuff a shell can be doing in those 3-4 seconds. Just some examples of what my shells are doing: archiving my history (diffing & zipping files), bash completion, git completion, read color definitions, run OS-specific scripts, run host-specific scripts, add (read & parse) lots of aliases & functions, run /etc/bashrc (which on my macOS laptop is almost 3k lines long)

The last performance issue I had was my history archiving junk got too big, I was saving my full .bash_history into an archive every day without clearing .bash_history, so they kept getting bigger. Diffing against the previous day, and writing a smaller file, fixed it.

You can binary search by putting a couple of "date +%s%N" in your .bashrc or .bash_profile to find out what's taking the longest.

[loeg]

Yep, I have profiled my shrc scripts in exactly this fashion before for exactly this reason.