slow loading page

I have just installed Centos 4.2 running on a new Dell server (Xeon 2.4Ghz, SCSI HD, 1GB RAM) with Apache 2.0.52, PHP 4.3.9 and MySQL 4.1.12. There is NOTHING in the html directory yet except for a simple index.php page with two echo statements in it for demo purposes. The statement is as follows: <?php echo ("<h2>Hello World</h2>"); echo ("font color=\"red\" face=\"helvetica\" size=\"20px\">This is www.domain.com</font>"); ?> This page takes about 20 seconds to load. When I do the same page but with plain html it loads in a fraction of a second. The server is about 20 feet away from me in a server room too. I didn't compile the PHP or Apache from source either - it is from the disro install. Anyone else have any issues like this? I should have virtually zero latency on this set up. I also turned on (php.ini) error display and I get no errors displayed nor any in the log files - it just takes forever to load. When I do a <?php phpcredits(); ?> it also takes about the same amount of time to load. thanks, Doug