I'm running

Ubuntu Linux 12.04.1
Kernel and CPU Linux 3.2.0-30-generic on x86_64.
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E31230 @ 3.20GHz, 8 cores

I recently came across this problem. I'm using apache2/php latest and when I run

$url_headers = @get_headers($url);

Inside PHP it would normally take milliseconds to within a second to get the headers. Now recently it can take up to 15 seconds or even timeout.

It has worked great for over a year and recently started doing this. I'm not sure how to go about fixing it, any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you