Disable all the non-bundled plugins and try again. If it becomes faster, you know that one of the non-bundled plugins is doing something stupid. If it does not become faster, it simply means you need to get a more powerful development environment.

Try HTTP Combiner. It speeds up development environments, too.

Hi Juho. Thank you for your reply. I didn't install any third party plugin, it is a fresh install. I am not quite sure whether it has anything to do with the server. I will have a try with other development environment and report further on. 

Hi Steve. It does seem a little bit faster. 5 - 10 seconds faster, I would say, but it is still frustrating for me given the original loading time is 1 minute. The plugin is pretty cool. it should be in the elgg core. Thanks  

My experience: Macbook Pro (Late 2013, OSX 10.11, 2.6GHz, 8G RAM, SSD), Apache 2.4, PHP 5.6, Elgg 2.2.1, all bundled plugins enabled, no non-bundled, caches off, logged out, on /login page (baseline test because it displays no entities), empty cache and hard reload.

18 requests, 220K, Load: 550ms

For comparison:

Elgg 1.12: 17 requests, 225K, Load 336ms

Elgg 2.2 (with HTTP Combiner): 4 requests, 211K, Load 400ms

...with caches on: 177K, Load 230ms.

You said that you have no 3rd party plugins installed. But what about the plugin you are currently developing. Are the pages also loaded as slowly with the cache disabled when you disable this plugin?

With a local Elgg installation and no traffic / other users on the site, the caching shouldn't make that large a difference for sure. You would notice a difference but surely not in matters of loading times of more than a few seconds (very, very few seconds actually).

@Steve Clay  in my case it can never load that fast even with the cache on

@iionly  It makes no difference even if I deactivate and remove my own theme. That is why this looks so bizarre to me. not sure what went wrong. Is there any specific setting I might have ignored? Everything, the server requirements, data directory, all seem normal when installing. 

In my case, MacBook Air (13-inch, Early 2015; processor: 1.6 GHz Intel Core i5; memory: 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3), ubuntu/trusty64; php7; mysql 5.5. The virtual box is pretty the same with the one I used to develop an Laravel app which has no performance issue.