arcgis desktop - Is there a significantly faster way to buffer than arcmap?

I hope this question is appropriate here and I apologize if it is more of a discussion question than a specific technical problem.

I have to buffer 150,000 polygons for a real estate project. While it's not impossibly slow, it got me wondering about 'the fastest way to geoprocess'. What packages, tips, or tricks could be used to make this faster? Does anyone have an idea how arcmap, arcpy, shapely, postgres compare in performance time?

EDIT: After asking around, I heard 'arcpy is slow!' a lot.