Comment 9 for bug 295136

Yes, I agree that the problem seems to be related to pulseaudio (it is the only part of the sound system that includes networking), but I really like pulse and don't want to uninstall it.

Aside from that, I'm really not sure what the application is doing. In the strace above, you can see that amixer is talking on port 53, which is DNS, and is trying to resolve localhost. I have found that I had an incorrect entry in /etc/hosts (it mentioned localhost.localdomain while amixer was trying to resolve localhost.loos.site), which I thought would explain it. However, I have since corrected my /etc/hosts and the problem didn't go away.

There are a few things I'd still like to try, and I'll probably get to it this weekend:
- removing/commenting out everything in /usr/share/alsa/pulse.conf - which should prevent pulseaudio from being loaded
- removing the mdns references in /etc/nsswitch.conf - which I think is causing the slowdown
- removing the search-domain entry in /etc/resolv.conf - to see if it is the search entry that causes the spurious dns requests