title: Cucumber (even without rails) Very Slow
body: <p>The simple command <code>cucumber -h</code> takes 4-6 seconds to execute on my machine.  Not surprisingly, running the most basic cucumber tests, even outside of rails, takes the same amount of time.  </p>
  
  <p>Is there any way to speed this up?  What exactly is taking so long, if the tests themselves are listed as running in ~100ms?</p>
  
  <p>I am on win7, ruby 1.9.2, 2.5GHz processor and 6G ram.</p>