Dismayed by how long a Python script I've developed was taking to copy features to a shapefile, I decided to do some testing. When run from ArcToolbox, the Copy Features (management) tool takes about 12 minutes to copy a large point feature class from SDE to a local shapefile. I wrote a small test script that does the exact same thing, using CopyFeatures_management to copy the same SDE feature class to a local shapefile, and it took over 2 hours!
What could possibly explain this discrepancy? I've seen a few mentions of similar problems with the CopyFeatures tool on the old forums but no real explanation or solution.