The > /dev/null is the killer. Inside a terminal, if I'm reading between the lines correctly, the individual in question is running into a purely display-buffer bottleneck, in much the same way one would find a slower crunch time onto a 5400rpm disk vs a 7200rpm disk. The only reason the software itself should run slow is pure CPU cycles, until you start either writing it to stdout/stderr, or to a disk/network. Inbuilt cracking should be fine, but generating any kind of visual list would slow things down significantly.
I could be firing from the left field though, in which case write it off as a bit of random knowledge transferred ;)

