This only occurs in 4.4 onwards. 

Upgrades of Moodle between extremely minor versions, on test sites with absolutely no usage (and therefore no cache build up) are taking for ever. 

The situation is so bad from the web interface that we can only do upgrades via the CLI and while they complete, this is crazy slow

This is in a docker container running on AWS ECS backed by Fargate environment. The PHP8.1 docker image we use for 4.4 is identical to the one we use for 4.3 that does not have this issue.

Caching wise in that test environment, we are using APCu, Redis & shared file in the same way we do in prod (4.3) which is mostly identical to the boiler plate recommendation here - https://github.com/catalyst/moodle-tool_forcedcache?tab=readme-ov-file#step-3-wire-up-the-configuration