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I had an issue tonight with a Wordpress site I’ve been working on.  It’s a new domain, and it currently only exists within my basement.  The problem was that every page view within Wordpress was taking about 20 seconds to load.  Not cool.

I did ping tests and looked for errors in packets, but it all looked normal.  I tested network connectivity with other software, and the system behaved as expected.  I thought my problem might be Apache, but some of my own code worked just fine.  (This didn’t make sense because there’s no way my code is worthy of comparison to Wordpress’ code.)

Finally (more hours than I care to count later), I added an entry for the new domain in the hosts file.  That fixed it.  Apparently, Wordpress uses that hostname for something, and if it’s not resolvable by the server, you’ll see some pretty substantial delays.

This was with Wordpress 2.1.3.  I found this documented somewhere in the Wordpress support forums, but I can’t find the link right now.