Maybe if you trust DNS resolution names to make the connection to the Database servers could be a problem. Did you try to use IP addresses directly in the code?

Yes, I have tried that too, no difference. I've even tried running MySQL with a database populated with identical data on localhost (even tried 127.0.0.1), but there is no difference in performance. Delays in the connection to the db server is still around 20-30 seconds.

So, the problem has to be with either the php-mysql module, PHP itself, MySQL or then it may be hardware related.

Thx, /mysteron