On CircleCI, Meteor executes impossibly slowly for Chimp Cucumber

I tried to run some Chimp Cucumber tests on CircleCI. Between starting Meteor and starting Chimp I had to insert a sleep 3m command, because Meteor was taking more than 2 & 1/2 minutes to begin serving! On my i7 laptop, in a KVM virtual machine, it needs about 40 seconds.

The Chimp tests take 90 seconds on my laptop. In CircleCI they take nearly 4 minutes and spew more erroneous recriminations than Donald Trump.

It’s unusable.

Are there some secret tips for getting Meteor to run well in CircleCI?