pass is 15x slower on one machine than another. How to debug?

[Ryan Lue]

> Suddenly, pass is v. slow on my desktop.
> 
>     $ time pass ls
> 
> shows 0.6s on my desktop vs. 0.04s on my laptop.
> Both are comparably specced and running
> nearly identical installations of Debian buster. 

Anybody have any insight on this? I just tried

    $ sudo apt remove pass
    $ sudo apt purge pass
    $ sudo /sbin/shutdown -r now
    $ sudo apt install pass

And with no configuration whatsoever,
even the following takes a full 500ms+:

    $ pass
    Error: password store is empty. Try "pass init".

If it’s worth anything, here’s the output of `perf`:

    $ perf stat -d pass
    Error: password store is empty. Try "pass init".

     Performance counter stats for 'pass':
     
                572.07 msec task-clock                #    1.002 CPUs utilized
                    39      context-switches          #   68.182 M/sec
                     4      cpu-migrations            #    6.993 M/sec
                11,340      page-faults               # 19825.175 M/sec
         1,460,072,703      cycles                    # 2552574.656 GHz                   (49.01%)
         1,992,255,598      instructions              #    1.36  insn per cycle           (62.16%)
           455,778,853      branches                  # 796816176.573 M/sec               (74.74%)
            14,658,028      branch-misses             #    3.22% of all branches          (74.94%)
           636,151,570      L1-dcache-loads           # 1112153094.406 M/sec              (69.87%)
            21,669,014      L1-dcache-load-misses     #    3.41% of all L1-dcache hits    (25.06%)
             5,286,811      LLC-loads                 # 9242676.573 M/sec                 (24.35%)
               332,149      LLC-load-misses           #    6.28% of all LL-cache hits     (36.13%)
    
           0.571126333 seconds time elapsed
    
           0.549724000 seconds user
           0.023617000 seconds sys

I’m on pass v1.7.3.
Happy to provide any necessary information.
Any hints re: how to start debugging this problem would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Ryan