Django 1.8 startup delay troubleshooting
A partial answer.
After some time with WingIDE IDE's debugger, and some profiling with cProfile, I have located the main CPU hogging issue. 
During initial django startup there's a cascade of imports, in which module validators.py prepares some compiled regular expressions for later use. One in particular, URLValidator.regex, is complicated and also involves five instances of the unicode character set (variable ul). This causes re.compile to perform a large amount of processing, notably in sre_compile.py _optimize_charset() and in large number of calls to the fixup() function.
As it happens, the particular combination of calls and data structure apparently hit a special slowness in WingIDE 6.0b2 debugger. It's considerably faster in WingIDE 5.1 debugger (though still much slower than when run from command line). Not sure why yet, but Wingware is looking into it.
This doesn't explain the occasional slowness when launched from the command line on Windows; there's an outside change this was waiting for a sleeping drive to awaken. Still observing.
I'm trying to discover the cause of delays in Django 1.8 startup, especially, but not only, when run in a debugger (WingIDE 5 and 6 in my case).
Minimal test case: the Django 1.8 tutorial "poll" example, completed just to the first point where 'manage.py runserver' works. All default configuration, using SQLite. Python 3.5.2 with Django 1.8.14, in a fresh venv.
From the command line, on Linux (Mint 18) and Windows (7-64), this may run as fast as 2 seconds to reach the "Starting development server" message. But on Windows it sometimes takes 10+ secs. And in the debugger on both machines, it can take 40 secs.
One specific issue: By placing print statements at begin and end of django/__init__.py setup(), I note that this function is called twice before the "Starting... " message, and again after that message; the first two times contribute half the delay each. This suggests that django is getting started three times. What is the purpose of that, or does it indicate a problem? 
(I did find that I could get rid of one of the first two startup()s using the runserver --noreload option. But why does it happen in the first place? And there's still a startup() call after the "Starting..." message.)
To summarize the question:
-- Any insights into what might be responsible for the delay?
-- Why does django need to start three times? (Or twice, even with --noreload).