urllib slow on FreeBSD 4.7?

[dsavitsk]

has anyone else found urllib to be slow on FreeBSD?
[freebsd 4.7, python 2.2]

using

>>> f = open('somefile')
>>> u = urllib.urlopen('http://site/index.asp?file=somefile')
>>> f.write(u.read())

to get a 5 meg file takes about 1 to 2 seconds on a 500mhz windows computer
and nearly 2 minutes on a 150mhz freebsd computer.  (redhat 8 on a PII350 is
also fast) both client computers and the server are on the same network.
any ideas?  any other ways to get the file?

(urllib.urlrelrieve doesn't seem to work any better.)

-doug