What's the possible reasons for building SSH connection very slowly?

[William Thies]

I have a cluster.
Master node is uni-cpu and kernel is 2.4.18
Slave nodes are dual-cpu and kernel is 2.4.18-smp-7.95

The OPENSSH version is 2.9p2

The time for building a SSH coneection from master to
one slave is very slow, around 1 minutes.

For SSH based application,like MPICH, it spends most
of the time for building connection, the more nodes
invovled, the slower. 

What's the possible reason for such a slow SSH?

Thanks very much!

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