I tested baking inside a file with a about 1gb in size with about 100 objects. Baking a 1024x1024 normal map with selected to active took about 20 seconds.
Baking with the exact same two objects on a new file, the bake took less than a second with the same settings.
Is it normal that a larger file with more objects slows down your bake? Even if all the other objects were hidden in viewport and render, they still slowed down the bake. Even on an otherwise new empty scene in the larger file, the bake was just as slow.
I found what the issue is and I’m of the opinion that this is a bug. I had an object in the scene that had a boolean modifier on it. The object was hid in the render as well as viewport. But because the boolean modifier was not hid in render, it slowed down bakes for all other objects in the scene. Hiding the modifier itself in render solved the problem, but it’s not intuitive when the object of the modifier itself is already hidden in render, why should it affect anything even if the modifier is or not?