I just began experimenting with running wolframsrcipt on Macos, so far the startup time is very disappointing. I wrote the following script:

#!/usr/local/bin/wolframscript 
Print["hello"]

Running this script takes roughly five seconds, consistently. For instance, here I time the script from bash:

~/bin # time ./hello.wls
hello
real    0m4.809s
user    0m0.173s
sys     0m0.049s

Here is the version info for my installation of wolframscript:

~/bin # wolframscript -info
Wolfram 14.1.0 Kernel for Mac OS X x86 (64-bit)
Copyright 1988-2024 Wolfram Research, Inc.

Is this typical performance? A five second startup for a trivial script is a deal breaker for me. If anyone can suggest ways to make this faster, or to diagnose the reasons for the slow startup I'd love to explore them. On the other hand, if this is the expected level of performance I'll explore other avenues for my scripting needs.

Thank you.

David Cabana