Process creation time, shell script and system call overhead

I have a machine dual booted with Arch Linux and Ubuntu (16.04). I have recently started using the Kakoune text editor , and noticed that its startup time is drastically different depending on which OS I am using. However I believe the underlying problem is **not** due to kakoune directly. On startup, kakoune runs a bunch of shell scripts to enable integration with x11 and tmux, git, syntax highlighting/colorschemes, etc. This can be disabled to just load the 'vanilla' editor using the -n flag. The command: kak -e q will start kakoune, run all startup scripts and exit immediately. On Arch: time kak -e q takes **1 second** time kak -n -e q (no shell scripts) finishes in under **20 millis**. On Ubuntu: time kak -e q takes about **450 millis** time kak -n -e q is again under **20 millis** After trimming the fat and removing some of the startup scripts I did see an improvement on both OS's proportional to the amount removed. I ran some benchmarks with UnixBench and found that the major differences between the two systems are seen in the 'process creation' and 'shell scripts' tests. > The shells scripts test measures the number of times per minute a process can start and reap a set of one, two, four and eight concurrent copies of a shell scripts where the shell script applies a series of transformation to a data file. Here is the relevant output. Units in 'loops per second' more is better: Process creation (1 parallel copy of tests) Arch: 3,822 Ubuntu: 5,297 Process creation (4 parallel copies of tests) Arch: 18,935 Ubuntu: 30,341 Shell Scripts (1 concurrent) (1 parallel copy of tests) Arch: 972 Ubuntu: 5,141 Shell Scripts (1 concurrent) (4 parallel copies of tests) Arch: 7,697 Ubuntu: 24,942 Shell Scripts (8 concurrent) (1 parallel copy of tests) Arch: 807 Ubuntu: 2,257 Shell Scripts (8 concurrent) (4 parallel copies of tests) Arch: 1,289 Ubuntu: 3,001 As you can see the Ubuntu system performs much better. I have tested using different login shells, terminal emulators, recompiling kakoune, removing unneeded software to clean up the disk, etc. I am certain this is the bottleneck. **My question is:** what can I do to further investigate this and improve performance of the Arch Linux system to match Ubuntu? Should I look into tuning the kernel? Additional notes: - both systems use the same type of filesystem (ext4) - I tend to use the Archlinux system more, and have noticed performance degrading over time - Arch is on /dev/sda1 and is ~200GB. Ubuntu is on /dev/sda2, ~500GB. 1TB HDD. - Arch uname -a: Linux ark 4.14.13-1-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Wed Jan 10 11:14:50 UTC 2018 x86_64 GNU/Linux - Ubuntu uname -a: Linux sierra 4.4.0-62-generic #83-Ubuntu SMP Wed Jan 18 14:10:15 UTC 2017 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux Thanks