Slow database creation

Greetings!

My company has an application that runs on one machine and reads a
PostgreSQL database that may be located on another. I have a test
version of this application and a copy of their database on my computer.
A problem that the application solves on my machine in under 10 seconds
takes over 20 minutes on the customer's system. I believe the reason is
that data transfer between machines is extremely slow, but I don't know
why. This is not a large database. The largest queries return 300
records with 50 fields per record, and 1700 records from a table with 6
fields per record.

In order to test without disturbing the customer's production, I created
a copy of their production database on the production server. I often
create test databases, and I've never seen the CREATE DATABASE command
take longer than five seconds. On the customer's production machine,
the command took 167 seconds.

Can anyone explain why it would take 167 seconds to create a database?
I am hoping that it's the same reason that data access is slowing our
application by a factor of about 200.

The customer's machines run Windows Server 2003. My machine runs
Windows XP Professional. The application is written in C++.

Rob Richardson
Product Engineer Software

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