Created a small program using xmlrpclib.  When connecting to one url
where my list is < 300 items and the program finishes no problem. 
Connect to another url where my list is over 500 items and the program
times out after 40+ minutes with no results printed.  On my RHEL system
I used oprofile and determined that time spent was in ceval.c, symbol
PyEval_EvalFrame. This issue seems to be new to Python 2.4 as shipped
with RHEL.  I am currently in the process of building non-RHEL python to
 verify issue does or does not exist there as well.

<code>
#!/usr/bin/env python

import xmlrpclib

u = 'someuser'
p = 'password'

server_url = 'http://rhn.redhat.com/rpc/api'

server = xmlrpclib.Server(server_url)

session = server.auth.login(u,p)

l = server.channel.listSoftwareChannels(session)
for a in l:
    print a['channel_label']
</code>