A friend of mine just informed me that he solved the notorious slow Java execution problem on SuSE 9.0. He did it by disabling the firewall software!
I'm lacking much of details here on my (Linuxless, sigh) working place, but he had much troubles in starting the Tomcat server (among the other Java things). Then, he noticed that if URL he specified contained 127.0.0.1 (which is a loopback device, therefore demanding no DNS consulting), Tomcat initialization time was normal. But, if he specified something like localhost, a slow-down was tremendous.
Firewall can be disabled by issuing
/etc/init.d/firewall stop
(or something like that, I don't have a Linux box in front of me right now), but a much better (i.e. permanent) way is to turn it off in YaST.
Better than disabling were to configure firewall right :) But thanks, your letter solved my problem, I didn't think, that firewall was guilty. It was nessecary to allow some UDP ports. ain