6.5 connection time: too slow (?)

Hi,

I'm finally about to upgrade our prehistoric 6.1 to 6.5.2 and took few
hours to do some highly unscientific (Perl/DBI) benchmarking just to see
the difference... I was quite shocked when I found out that PG6.1 (on
Linux 2.0.34, loaded K6/166 server) was consistently three times faster
when connecting to the database then latest PG6.5.2 (on Linux 2.2.12,
unloaded P2/233, faster disk). The difference was 0.102-0.108 sec vs.
0.293-0.296 sec. For web usage, this is quite slow, even if actual
execute is usually fast enough (0.05-0.15 sec). Does anybody have any
idea what's going on? Specifically, is it possible RedHat 6.1 RPM I'm
using was compiled with some stupid switch that slows things down? Any
advices how to speed things up?

P.S. Apache::DBI is not of much use here, because I'm using 6+ different
databases, so it would keep six backends per http child... Thanks for
your comments.

- Robert