strange select issue

Hi All;

We have a local postgres database (8.3.x) with an application / web front end 
pulling data from it.  THe database server is on the east coast, we also have 
a remote application server in the UK.

We can run a select from one of our configuration/meta-data databases (via the 
app) locally and it takes a few minutes but nothing alarming. However when we 
select the same data set from the UK app server it takes several hours.  We 
did have SSL connections configured on the db server, we've turned SSL off 
and now the select from the UK app is faster but still takes about an hour.  
We can scp data from the db server to the UK server (via Linux moving a flat 
file) in a few seconds.

Anyone have any thoughts per how to debug this?

Thanks in advance