[OS X TeX] Time penalty when using kpsewhich on mac os x?

[jfbu]

Hi,

I have MacTeX 2014, regularly updated via the TeX Live Utility, 
on Mac OS X mavericks
OS X 10.9.5 (13F34)
Darwin 13.4.0

when I run in Terminal
time kpsewhich -var-value=TEXMFLOCAL

I get, typically:
/usr/local/texlive/texmf-local

real	0m0.491s
user	0m0.476s
sys	0m0.010s

I initiated a question on the tex-k mailing list,
and I got the info that this is not there on other
(non Mac) machines

Karl Berry wrote:

> 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.

Thus, I wonder if the 1/2 second for kpsewhich only to 
return the value of TEXMFLOCAL is observed on other Mac OS X
MacTeX installations, or if there is some misconfiguration
on my personal machine, like environment variables which could
induce kpsewhich to a non-necessary scanning
of repertories

for info I have still in /usr/local/texlive the 2012 and 2013
repertories,

about nothing in my  ~/Library/texmf and ~/Library/texlive

I do have a few things in /usr/local/texlive/texmf-local

best regards
Jean-Francois