"The urlopen() and urlretrieve() functions can cause arbitrarily long delays"

[7segment]

Hi!

The subject is a segment of a sentence which I copied from Python's 
official homepage. In whole, it reads:

"The urlopen() and urlretrieve() functions can cause arbitrarily long 
delays while waiting for a network connection to be set up. This means 
that it is difficult to build an interactive Web client using these 
functions without using threads."

Here is my issue: I am testing my web site (which I have some problems 
with), and comparing its response speed to a couple of other sites, such 
as msn.com and python.org. 

Now, it is very strange that python.org responds always under 0.5 s while 
my site takes about 20 s to respond! And MSN about 60 seconds! So it does 
not seem "arbitrary" to me. And I can figure out the mechanisms behind 
the long delays.

What I am wondering is if there's another way for me to go about. I 
didn't really find any solutions with "threads" as suggested by python's 
document base. Any suggestions?

This is really important because technicians at my web hotel do not use 
proper tools and my site has been nearly dysfunctional since their latest 
upgrade and I want to make a case with proper statistics.

Thank you in advance.