Serving up a web page on my local websrver for developing was super slow. I tried various things from looking into php memory settings and disaabling windows firewall to ressolve the issue.
The culprit was AVAST anti-virus and possibly Windows defender.
I after unisntalling AVAST or disabling the resident scanning all speediness has been restored!
I can't confirm whether Windows defender was contributing, but plan on testing this in the near future.