Hi Clay,
Thanks for your help on this, much appreciated.
Avast Business Security is causing the slow down.
I would occasionally, not always, get Avast prompts to Delete or Create an Exclusion for: WinNFSd.exe
I created/allowed the Exclusion many times, however, the exclusion would never save/stay active. Even if I launched Avast and entered the exclusion/path manually the exclusion would not stick.
The exclusion prompts could happen at anytime, even after login to WordPress and editing several pages. I turned off Avast several times to try to over come the issue but strangely WP sites on Local still did not speed up.
Solution:
Avast Business Security has issues - if your using the Cloud Console to manage several pc’s it doesn’t matter how many times you create an exclusion in your local Avast program, it will not save it. You have to login to the cloud console and edit or set up a new global template and from within that template create your exclusion there. Ain’t that amazing or stupid? 
Why Avast doesn’t inform you of this issue when prompting an exclusion is beyond me.
The path/file that I had to exclude is: C:\Users\bob\AppData\Local\Programs\local-by-flywheel\resources\extraResources\WinNFSd.exe
hth someone else.
Thanks Clay, great support :-)
Steve