I use docker on a mac, and... while I do feel it 'slow' in some sense, I've never seen 5-10 second access time to a mysql container. MBP 2019 here, but never saw that on MBP 2015 either. Is there some other mysql config that's trying to do some network lookup on the incoming connection? I vaguely recall that being an issue with mysql on bare metal servers years ago - if there was some specific network name as part of access control, the mysql would try to resolve the hostname, and that would sometimes be very slow, depending on external factors. (--skip-name-resolve and reverse DNS seemed to be things I'd found along the way, but I'm doing this from memory and it was 10+ years ago - haven't hit that issue in... a long time).