> Just a SWAG, but. time ruby -rsocket -e 'p Socket.gethostbyname("127.0.0.1")'
>
> is doing a reverse-"DNS" lookup. Might windoze be confused by having
> 127.0.0.1 map to three different hostnames in the hosts file?

At least on Linux, when I've had big slowdowns like this, throwing in

BasicSocket.do_not_reverse_lookup = true

made things run much faster.

I think we've discussed this issue on the list before, too.