Hi,
I knew I knew this problem. A 20/30 second delay is _always_ the DNS.
This time it was a bit more tricky: Using wget with the -S option, I was able to track down the delay to Pound on the server side. And running Pound with the -v option I could see a "gethostbyname(projop.dnsalias.com): Host name lookup failure".
And the reason for this failure is that I run Pound in a root jail, so that Pound can't access the normal /etc/resolv.conf. So I had to fix /var/pound/etc/resolv.conf, and that's it.
Thanks for your replies!
Frank