Quoting Steve Litt (slitt@???):

> Hi all,
>
> Another thread spoke of 10+ seconds for sshd to spin up, and several
> pointed to DNS. Back around the turn of the century I used to have
> these problems, at bootup, frequently. I finally found out that this
> happens when reverse DNS doesn't work.
>
> Nowadays, if I have long startup, the first thing I do make sure all my
> forward DNS, especially for localhost and my computer's hostname vs ip
> address.

Amen to that. Also, there can be subtle delay problems caused by an
attempt to do IPv6 DNS resolution, waiting for timeout, and then
following up by IPv4 resolution. Test for that using dig's handy '-4'
and '-6' switches.