CVS slowness issues

[Ryan Petrie]

I'm not entirely sure this is CVS-specific, but I can't get anything else 
to be as slow, so I'll ask here.

We have an old Pentium set up running Linux for CVS only.  It has two ISA 
ehternet cards in it -- one for the internal LAN, and another that sits on 
the internet.  We use pserver to authenticate and access the repository, 
and it works like a dream -- *if* we access it through the LAN only. 
 Through the other network card, it's unbearably slow.

The network usage is waaaay low, and the route to the server through the 
internet is still only three jumps from here with a ping time under 10 ms. 
 The machine seems completely idle in top, and cvs just sits there using a 
meg or two of memory and doing nothing.  Sometimes it can finish a diff or 
an update in a few minutes on a 100k text file, but other times it never 
seems to finish.  Other applications use the internet just fine, topping 
out our SDSL connection easily.

So the hardware works.  The network is not a bottleneck; neither are the 
processor or the memory capacity.  Any ideas?

We're using CVS 1.11.p1 as a server and WinCvs 1.2 (CVS 1.11) as a client. 
 The box is running Caldera eServer 2.3 (kernel 2.2.14).

Thanks in advance,

Ryan