Are you developing web applications on OS X Lion? Are you testing on a local server? Is it horribly slow?
You’re still here! Great, that means you, me, and a plethora of other devs have endured the same issue on OS X Lion, specifically.
While it may not be the only source of the slowdowns in your local stack the following trick might prove invaluable to you, as it was to us:
Open your /etc/hosts file, locate the 127.0.0.1 lines, and merge them into one line!
To this:

We all owe a big thanks to our friend Joey for the sweet hack! 🙂