GIMP is exporting and opening really slow

[Ofnuts]

No reason for Gimp to become slow. Images are likely the biggest files you create, so any I/O problem start showing up with Gimp...  Look for:

• natively slow output device
  

• worn out output device (SSD)
  
• fragmented filesystem
  
• slower file system (paranoid antivirus, encryption...)
  

Besides this, if you export to PNG the PNG compression algorithm is quite slow, especially at level 9. In most case, using a much lower compression level is faster while making little difference in file size.