Am I missing something? `w` on my linux system takes well below one second:
[burgerbrain@eeepc] ~ % time w
14:11:18 up 19:41, 6 users, load average: 0.27, 0.10, 0.14
USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT
REDACTED
w 0.01s user 0.05s system 61% cpu 0.096 total
I can't imagine why anything like that would ever take anywhere near 5 seconds.