fetching news from localhost takes a long time

[Al Arduengo]

I use leafnode and gnus 5.10.6.  For some reason I cannot seem to
ascertain when I press 'g' in the group buffer, it takes about 10
seconds to fetch and process new news no matter the volume.  I would
expect it to take only a few seconds since it is coming from the local
spool. I set check-new-newsgroups to nil and read-active-file to nil.
Is there a way to speed things up or determine where the delay is
being encountered?  Knode is quicker by far.  So is Pan.

256M on a 12G HDD with 5G available.  Thinkpad A20M 700MHz processor.


Thanks,
-Al