urllib slow on Leopard

Sun Feb 24 14:57:19 EST 2008

I've recently switched from Ubuntu to OS X Leopard. I have some python 
scripts which download info from the web. The scripts were working fine 
before on Ubuntu, but urllib seems to work really slowly on Leopard.

I tried an example from the docs:

 >>> import urllib2
 >>> f = urllib2.urlopen('http://www.python.org/')
 >>> print f.read(100)
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" 
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtm
 >>>

The line f = ... takes about a minute to return - but otherwise returns 
the predicted result. My web connection seems fine, so has anyone got 
any ideas as to what the problem might be?