Quick Question...
It seems as though my servers take quite awhile to respond to FTP and telnet requests, even when done on the local network. What could be the cause of this. Is it possible that the service is not running, and is started up when a request comes in?

Thanks

Problems like this are usually attributed to reverse DNS lookup issues. Check to see if your /etc/resolv.conf and /etc/hosts files are set up correctly.

If the resolv.conf and host info is fine, then next would be...

Check the services in your /etc/inetd.conf file. Close down any that are not in use to make sure that you aren't being taken advantage of by 'the bad people'. After saving it and closing it (make sure you know what your changes do before restarting inetd. Some of the things you may want to check on restarting inetd are the service instances. Redhat defaults to 40 instance request per second, if you are getting this many requests or more per second, your initial setup will falter. You can change this within the inetd.conf file for the particular instance or you can change it globally on the command line by passing a parameter at inetd's startup. Check inetd and inetd.conf's man page for specific information.

Also, if you are using Redhat 7+, you are fighting your way through the ipchains service and it will slow down initial connects, as well.