I've played arround a bit with utils.php.
If you change
$fp = @fsockopen($host, 80);
with
$fp = @fsockopen("127.0.0.1", 80);
... I got down from 6,51 to 1,74 seconds time to load.
So why using here a domainname, which need to do a DNS-Lookup, if you can enhance the speed up to 375% ?
Please change this in the Core for future-releases.