Slow server response

[daik]

Hello all!
I have a couple of machines running various versions of Mandriva (2007, 2008 at this moment). I run a ftp server on both (proftpd, the one that comes with the dist), but I get very slow performance on them.
If I run "ftp localhost" I get a response right away prompting for my username and password. If I instead type "ftp [the IP of the machine]" I have to wait maybe 5-10 seconds before it prompts me. I have the same problem under both 2007 and 2008. Once connected I again have to wait 5-10 seconds for a file transfer to start, but once a transfer is going I get the speed I expect over the connection. Is there something I can do to improve the response time when initiating a transfer?
As far as I can tell the same problem occurs for svn. But it seems it is not occurring for http.

regards
Daniel

[daik]

I have by chance found a solution to this problem. It seems that the connection (ftp is all I've tried so far) is slow if the client IP is not in the server's hosts file. I put an entry in for my client and now it is much faster. It seems it was related to name resolution.