The laptop I'm working on was decent when new, six years ago, but is now not the fastest thing on the block. It has certainly collected quite a lot of things there (mostly from system packages), but it is probably just one or two things that are spending most of the time (excluding I/O time).

It's interesting; now that I've tried running it a few more times, `help('modules')` on my Python 2.7 is getting down to six or so seconds. (On Python 3 it takes around 0.15 seconds.)