That is a little slow for dns, I would check out the dns setup to try and find out why. I guess...actually 8 or 9 seconds probably wouldn't be much motivation. You can do stuff like setting up a caching-only name server on the target box. Or even use a hosts file. You probably can also configure your ftp server and ssh server to log ip addresses only. There are lots of options now that you know where the delay is.