Why would it take one minute for man tr to show me the manpage? I’m running macOS 14.7. Sure, my laptop is 5 years old. Still, it should not literally take 60 seconds to show a manpage. And yes, this was only the first invocation. The second time was instant.

Theory 1

Manpages are stored in a gigantic encrypted compressed file and the macOS man command effectively has to decrypt and decompress the entire thing just to show one manpage.

Theory 2

The manpages are downloaded over the Internet from Apple’s manpage server?

Theory 3

The manpages had to be indexed by something slow before being readable.

Theory 4

Some other 3rd party software got in the way.

Theory 5

The effective MANPATH included some slow network filesystem.

Conclusion

I don’t know what this was, but it was slow.