Cloverleaf experiencing slowness in its nslookup

We are on qdx5.4.1 and AIX 5.2. A week ago we started noticing slowness in some of our processings, for example: hcimsiutil -dd to dump the stats of a thread will take over 2 minutes to return. Doing a list of processes that are running would show multiple “nslookup” entries. We found that cloverleaf is doing nslookup of host entries only defined in local host table against the DNS server. It fails and the negative response comes back slowly.

Has anyone experienced the same problem? Why is cloverleaf trying to lookup a host table entry against DNS? We know it’s been working before without the slowness until a week ago, so it has to be a change in the environment, but the fact that it’s doing the nslookup puzzles us. Any ideas?