On server startup, we call get_local_ips which in turn calls getaddrinfo for a few host names.

Under some circumstances, this step can take a while. It is done before we print any messages to the log or console, so this can be confusing. @deontologician ran into a case where the server was taking 15-30 seconds to come up, and we didn't know what was going on at first.

It would be nice if we could detect that the process is taking a while, and print a message about what's going on in that case.

This probably doesn't come up much in normal configurations.
In our case it happened because the OS X machine just had its hostname changed. After a reboot things were fine again. Hence pretty low priority...