This is probably network specific, because at my home office things are fine, but on site at a client, Rspec starts up very slow when running against spork. I tracked it down to line 19 in $GEM_PATH/gems/rspec-1.3.0/lib/spec/runner/drb_command_line.rb
DRb.start_service("druby://:0"); \
Change it to...
DRb.start_service("druby://127.0.0.1:0"); \
I think I have seen postings to the Rspec mailing list in regards to this issue. I will try to track them down to add to this post.
Update
It appears this is an OS X related issue. Checkout this thread for more information: http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/154556. Thank you, Stuart.
