15 seconds to get "Server Greeting" packet

[William Hamlin]

For some reason, access to my MySQL database is extremely slow. But not all the time. It just kind of "gets stuck" sometimes.

I did an ethereal trace and see a 15 second delay before the server spits out "Server Greeting" at the beginning of the dialog.

I'm running 4.1.10 on RedHat Enterprise release 3. I use the RPMs from www.mysql.com. I access the database from my C programs, PHP/Apache, and Navicat for Windows, and they all seem to experience the phantom 15 second delay.

What do you think I'm doing wrong?

Thanks for any help,
Bill