As another data point, emerge has a noticeable delay (a few seconds, up to 10 or so for deep dep trees), but it does a full resolution and isn't using all cores

As another data point, emerge has a noticeable delay (a few seconds, up to 10 or so for deep dep trees), but it does a full resolution and isn't using all cores (or isn't using them well anyway -- total utilization is under 15% while resolution is underway). It's much faster than conda on similar machines. Is conda making a bunch of network calls as part of its resolution process?