I know this is an old post, but I just survived this very struggle.
I had a very slow installation of Drupal 7 on a Windows 7 64-bit virtual machine. I reliably had 20 seconds of page loading. For some time I struggled and tried:
- disabling IPv6
- localhost settings
- increased memory limits
- Since my local host is a development machine, I did not want caching and caching of operation code to be enabled all the time, although I tried to do it.
As a result, changes to the host file made some changes, but Drupal CRON turned out to be the main problem.
As it turned out, since I copied my production installation to work on the local computer, CRON was unable to do what was supposed to be when it started locally. Therefore, it never completed execution successfully.
Since the attempt failed, each new request will try to run CRON again, therefore, the execution time is 20 seconds.
You can disable cron (for example, in Administration> Configuration> System> Cron (admin / config / system / cron) by setting the "Run cron every" parameter to "Never".
See here for more details: https://www.drupal.org/cron
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