Slow program execution

I've been working on a site, that I'm ready to launch in about a week or so, and when I deployed it to my server, I noticed it ran considerably slower than my test machine. This made no sense, because the server has a lot more bandwidth and hardware than my test machine.

After doing numerous tests, I'm pretty sure that it's because the server is executing programs much slower than my test machine. Here are some results of time and a particular command:

My machine:
time ping -c 1 yahoo.com
real 0m0.135s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.010s

time dig yahoo.com
real 0m0.070s
user 0m0.010s
sys 0m0.000s


The server:
time ping -c 1 yahoo.com
real 0m12.182s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.010s

time dig yahoo.com
real 0m1.079s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.000s



The server is very inconsistent. Sometimes it takes 12 seconds to execute the ping command, sometimes 3, and once it was at .049s. I know it's not network issues, because the query times of dig and the ping response times are faster than my machine. It's just that the execution is so much slower. I've run top on it, and it shows just 5% CPU usage.

I've got no clue why this is happening. I need to make them run faster. If anyone has any ideas on what to do, I appreciate them. Both my test machine and the server run OS X.