Ok, I got what seems to be the correct answer: http://superuser.com/a/558715/53951 In a nutshell, the misconfiguration of my ISP's DNS results in reverse DNS queries of my IP address timing out. So now my questions are: - can anyone confirm that hackage indeed attempts to do reverse DNS lookup on the client's IP address? - is it really necessary? I'll try to convince my ISP to fix their DNS, but I'm not sure I'll succeed, and there may be other people affected by this. Roman * Roman Cheplyaka [2013-02-28 10:49:04+0200]

I have this weird problem accessing hackage, when the first response gets delayed by 30 seconds: http://superuser.com/q/557271/53951

Does anyone else experience it? (No need to reply with "works for me" — I know that it works for most people.)

Any clues about what can be the problem?

Roman