[tex-k] speed of kpsewhich to get value of TEXMFLOCAL

[Karl Berry]

1) Defining environment variables often causes all kinds of trouble down
the road -- stale envvar settings is the #1 culprit in TeX bug reports.
So I don't recommend it.

2) The "bottleneck" is not generic to any installation.  Running
kpsewhich -var-value=TEXMFLOCAL returns instantly on my machine, and, I
would assume, just about everyone else's or this exact report would be
flooding the list.  After all, this invocation is just reading a couple
relatively small text files.

3) I have no knowledge as to what can be causing the absurd delay on
Mavericks.  I don't use Macs.  Perhaps something (perhaps environment
variables) is causing kpsewhich to actually search the disk for
everything instead of just reading the ls-R files.  Running
  kpsewhich --debug=1 --var-value=TEXMFLOCAL >&/tmp/out
and then perusing the (voluminous) output might yield some clues.
I don't know.  It's not going to come for free.

4) You could try asking mactex-support at tug.org.  Assuming you are using
MacTeX and not macports or any of the other various TeX distributions on
Macs (sorry if you already stated this, I can't remember and can't look
it up right now).  Each Mac thing should have its own support forums.

Good luck,
Karl