mc stalls on startup

Midnight commander misc/mc is probably my most used program and from time to time it appears to stall on startup, ie it seems to take a minute or two to start. Normally it starts up instantly.

Has anyone else ever come across this and knows why it happens?
 
Yes, many times over ssh, when something tries to resolve hostname for an IP address from which I am connected. Because there is no PTR record for such address in most cases and this stall appears only from time to time I suppose that it is something broken with DNS resolving on given target machine - underlying resolver doesn't return NO RECORD immediately, but tries to find it somewhere to no avail until timeout. Usually regular DNS queries for for example A or CNAME records work just fine - ping some-well-known-domain.com works as expected.
 
This usually indicates a DNS resolving problem somewhere. I've had it happen on hosts where there was no entry for 127.0.0.1 in /etc/hosts for example.
 
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