[thelist] Takes 1 minute for PHP to send email

[Tony Grimes]

We're seeing a one minute delay when people submit some of our PHP forms. I
eventually tracked it down to sendmail. Whenever PHP tries to send an email,
sendmail sends it, but it takes about a minute for it to return true so that
PHP can get on with the rest of the script.

Has anyone experienced this before? We think it has something to do with the
network we're on (this problem only occurred after we moved the server).
It's behind a D-Link router/firewall with DHCP disabled and port 25
forwarded to a dedicated mail server (i.e. not the server running the
script). We've gone over the configuration a hundred times, run all sorts of
tests and even set up a duplicate system on another network (which had no
problems). All we can figure out is that it might be a name server issue
(we've eliminated PHP and sendmail as a cause).

We're also seeing a lag with FTP and SSH, but I'm not sure if it's related.
It takes our computers about 20-30 seconds to connect via FTP (just for the
initial connection; all transfers afterward proceed as normal). We have the
same problem with SSH.

I realize it's hard to give advice on system/network configurations when you
don't have direct access, but I'm hoping someone will recognize these
symptoms and know of a fix, or even the cause.

Our sys admin is stumped, so any help would be greatly appreciated.

Tony