Admin Main Page Loads Slow

I'm getting ready to test and implement my test server installation of Omeka on our live server and everything is going well, but for some reason the main admin page (/admin/) takes 12 seconds to load. Any other page in the admin (/admin/*) and public site load quickly however.

This behavior does not occur on my test server. I've tried making the live server environment the same as my test server's. They are both FreeBSD 8.3, run the identical version/configuration of Apache. My live server doesn't have all the php53 packages that my test server does, but it has all the required ones (like exif, fileinfo, mysqli) and there are no other issues with my live server Omeka instance.

I show nothing in my Apache logs that would explain the slow page load.

What's significant about it that makes a 12 second delay (every time) in loading the main admin page?

Thanks for the upgrade (?) to this site. Running much faster. Much appreciated. :)

- Gavin