This looks like cache problem. Could you chceck If var, settings, design are writable by eZ publish If you using NTFS file system? Try also disable your antivirus to be sure If this is a reason.
i guess it has much to do with the antivirus, which tests every php-script, and the setuproutine has many of them as it also tests the include-files (when reading/opening files).
i manually excluded the ezpulish directory from scanning and now it has a reasonable speed. but only after hitting the cache. so first page-compiles are a little slow.
perhaps this can be an example if others have problems with very slow speed to check their antivirus behaviour.
on the other hand it displays the complexity of ezpublish and that there are very much (include-)files involved... i checked my xampp installation and there i had the same problem, but the scripts i used before were fast enough, so i didnt recognize antivirus was slowing them. ezpublish is the first web-application( script) i run, which cause timeouts due to antivirus-scanning.
For better performance you can use PHP accelerator. This works on windows platform too. http://ez.no/community/blog/a_free_php_accelerator_for_win_and_lin
I had the same problem with the windows installer. Using EasyPHP and the .tar.gz download solved this problem for me...
But it still isn't that fast :-[ I wonder what it will be like on a host.
Do you need some kind of custom, high performance hosting? Or should you be able to run eZ on a shared host at a reasonable speed? If special hosting is needed, then eZ is not what I'm looking for...
I had a similar problem when I installed ezp3.0 back in the days...
Windows, antivirus and my lack of a php accelerator all added up (as well as my PC not being anywhere near as powerful as my [shared] server) to my site being pretty slow until a decent amount of caching was performed.
I since have been using a reasonably cheap host to test out and develop ezpublish sites, then moving them to a more secure/faster server environment once the site has been developed.