@pascal I had deleted my post before your reply appeared because I’m not certain whether some other variables such as other open software affected the results, and also not sure about the timings…
I don’t think Worksession is significant. I use it to have the background data such as meshes from photogrammetry in separate files from the modeling. I also usually use a considerably faster desktop, and have the files on an internal HDD. The files I loaded were from a project which is a couple of years old but were available.
I’ll try to run a more definitive test tomorrow.