> It seems reasonable to me that the interpreter should be able to
> initialize and write to stdout in less than half a second

Well, we have some very slow buildbots and others which seem quite loaded too.
(this one should be very fast but perhaps there's some other stuff going on in the background)

In my experience such a low timeout value may be enough for light in-process stuff such as lock.acquire() or select(), but if you spawn a whole new process you should let the system breathe a bit more. I know this also unfortunately increases the test runtime, but try to bump it up to at least 1.5 seconds.