Hi Stan,
I have confirmed this and posted on the devel list. The suggestion was to run a trace on it but on Mac El Capitan this is really hard to to the new 'rootless' system where even root cannot trace things without going through great complexity, which even as a UNIX developer myself I cannot figure out.
My request for Mac developers to give some advice on the devel list has so far had nil response.
The time to compile a single note file is over forty seconds every time I run. The 2.19.47 release is therefore unusable by any standard.
Previously, the leading edge releases have been very stable and always anticipated. Recently, they have become problematic and buggy. I am not what has led to this decline. Even Mr Kastrup himself has made a comment along the same lines. In the past I have always recommended going with the latest dev releases to people. This no longer seems like wise advice. Hopefully things will revert to stability again in the future.
Are there any Mac developers on the user list here who know how to trace a process on El Capitan?
Andrew