For people using a mac. When you're using different host names say test.local and test2.local. Try changing test.local to test.dev. I found out that Mac OS X lion controls the .local tld. So when you change it to something else it's faster.
And of course use above suggestions like turning off the ipv6 reference in your hosts file:
#::1 localhost
and setting this in the hosts file: 127.0.0.1 localhost
so it points to ipv4.