Q:

NGINX on OSX - Performing terribly slow

I I've been trying to get NGINX up and running on my OSX 10.7 Lion computer. I have it running however simple html pages every few are taking a long time to load; for example:
<html> 
  <body>
    test
  </body> 
</html>

Same thing happens with php:
<?php
  echo('hi');
?>

If i hit refresh, it seems as it's almost rebuilding the entire page before it renders and creating some kind of object. Just painfully slow..
This seems to be most frequent if I do some coding then go back to refresh a page. (10-20+ seconds then going back and refreshing a page takes a good 4-6 seconds).. It almost appears that once idle it takes a while to re-wake back up.
i'm pulling my hair out trying to understand what is going on, hopefully someone can shed some light on this for me.
System Configuration:

OS: OSX 10.7.2
Processor: 2 x 2.66 GHZ Dual-Core Intel Xeon
Memory: 8gb 667 MHz

Nginx Version: 1.0.11
PHP Version: 5.3.9
I have installed this from a clean format of OSX (Which I thought was initially my error, sadly it wasn't).
Update
After updating my error_log file to contain debug per Fox's suggestion in comments I'm now seeing the following message appear in my error_log:
2012/01/23 11:57:02 [info] 88015#0: *26 client closed prematurely connection 
while reading client request line, client: 127.0.0.1, server: sandbox.local

Update Two
Upon inspecting with chrome I did find that it seems DNS resolving is taking a bit? 

Update Three - SOLVED
After Update Two fixed /etc/hosts file to use:
127.0.0.1 sandbox.local
AND
::1 sandbox.local 
Thanks to @thinice I was able to go through strace and notice that all requests targeting localhost directly from telnet were always instant; which then prompted DNS checking and finally led to finding this!
OSX /etc/hosts Bugs
I'm not sure if this is a nginx bug; as when I previously had appache installed this was working just fine.
============
Here are my config files:
NGINX Config
user petrogad staff;
worker_processes  2;

#error_log  logs/error.log;
#error_log  logs/error.log  notice;
#error_log  logs/error.log  info;

pid        /usr/local/ngnix/var/run/nginx.pid;

events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}

http {
    include mime.types;

    default_type text/plain;
    server_tokens off;

    sendfile on;
    tcp_nopush on;
    keepalive_timeout 10;

   # gzip on;
   # gzip_comp_level 2;
   # gzip_proxied any;
   # gzip_types text/plain text/css text/javascript application/json application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss;

    index index.html index.php;
    include /usr/local/ngnix/conf/sites-enabled/*.link;
}

Server Config
{
    listen 80;
    server_name sandbox.local;
    root /www/sandbox;

    access_log /Users/petrogad/logs/ngnix-sites/sandbox_log.txt;
    error_log /Users/petrogad/logs/ngnix-sites/sandbox_log.txt;

    location /
    {
        # First attempt to serve request as file, then
        # as directory, then fall back to index.html
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html;
        autoindex on;
    }

    include /usr/local/ngnix/conf/php.conf;
}

PHP Include
fastcgi_intercept_errors on;

location ~ \.php$
{
    #fastcgi_intercept_errors on;
    fastcgi_param PATH_INFO         $fastcgi_path_info;
    fastcgi_param PATH_TRANSLATED   $document_root$fastcgi_path_info;
    fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING      $query_string;
    fastcgi_param REQUEST_METHOD    $request_method;
    fastcgi_param CONTENT_TYPE      $content_type;
    fastcgi_param CONTENT_LENGTH    $content_length;
    fastcgi_param SCRIPT_NAME       $fastcgi_script_name;
    fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME   $request_filename;
    fastcgi_param REQUEST_URI       $request_uri;
    fastcgi_param DOCUMENT_URI      $document_uri;
    fastcgi_param DOCUMENT_ROOT     $document_root;
    fastcgi_param SERVER_PROTOCOL   $server_protocol;
    fastcgi_param GATEWAY_INTERFACE CGI/1.1;
    fastcgi_param SERVER_SOFTWARE   nginx;
    fastcgi_param REMOTE_ADDR       $remote_addr;
    fastcgi_param REMOTE_PORT       $remote_port;
    fastcgi_param SERVER_ADDR       $server_addr;
    fastcgi_param SERVER_PORT       $server_port;
    fastcgi_param SERVER_NAME       $server_name;

    fastcgi_read_timeout 60; # Set fairly high for debugging

    fastcgi_pass  127.0.0.1:9001; # Non-default port
    fastcgi_index index.php;
}

Fast CGI Config
fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME    $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param  QUERY_STRING       $query_string;
fastcgi_param  REQUEST_METHOD     $request_method;
fastcgi_param  CONTENT_TYPE       $content_type;
fastcgi_param  CONTENT_LENGTH     $content_length;

fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_NAME        $fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param  REQUEST_URI        $request_uri;
fastcgi_param  DOCUMENT_URI       $document_uri;
fastcgi_param  DOCUMENT_ROOT      $document_root;
fastcgi_param  SERVER_PROTOCOL    $server_protocol;

fastcgi_param  GATEWAY_INTERFACE  CGI/1.1;
fastcgi_param  SERVER_SOFTWARE    nginx/$nginx_version;

fastcgi_param  REMOTE_ADDR        $remote_addr;
fastcgi_param  REMOTE_PORT        $remote_port;
fastcgi_param  SERVER_ADDR        $server_addr;
fastcgi_param  SERVER_PORT        $server_port;
fastcgi_param  SERVER_NAME        $server_name;

# PHP only, required if PHP was built with --enable-force-cgi-redirect
fastcgi_param  REDIRECT_STATUS    200;

PHP-FPM Config
[global]
pid = /usr/local/php-5.3.9/var/run/php-fpm.pid
daemonize = yes

[www]
listen = 127.0.0.1:9001
user = petrogad
group = staff
pm = dynamic
pm.max_children = 10
pm.start_servers = 5
pm.min_spare_servers = 5
pm.max_spare_servers = 10
pm.max_requests = 500

Attempted Simple solution with the following nginx config, same slow result as above:
user petrogad staff;
worker_processes  2;

pid        /usr/local/ngnix/var/run/nginx.pid;

events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}

http {

    include mime.types;

    default_type text/plain;
    server_tokens off;

    sendfile on;
    tcp_nopush off;
    keepalive_timeout 0;

    index index.html;

  server
  {
    listen 80;
    server_name sandbox.local;
    root /www/sandbox;

    access_log /Users/petrogad/logs/ngnix-sites/sandbox_log.txt;
    error_log /Users/petrogad/logs/ngnix-sites/sandbox_log.txt;

    location /
    {
        autoindex on;
    }

  }

}

A:

Start by stripping out all unnecessary configuration options.
Get the setup to a bare-bones 'Im only serving HTML files' default configuration.
Remove optimizations.
Slowly start adding aspects back in a few at a time, restart your stack and test.
If you're feeling ambitious, you can run strace on a single server process to get timings. Have a look at this for a crash course.

