Check that you have correct permissions so that cache files are created. 3.1 is faster then 3.0 when you have enabled caching. It sounds like there is a charset conversion which takes alot of time. Do you see this on the debug output?
On my development PC ( 1GHz PIII IBM ) the login page takes about 0.29 seconds to load. The cached views takes about the same.
Yes it's definitely the translation that's causing wreck havoc here.
When I set en-UK, I get to see the login page in 0.3Xs on the 2Ghz machine!
So translation is one area where some work needs to be done (maybe have the setup insert the translation into the files statically instead of translating stuff on the fly each time?)
The problem can be related to the caching of the translation files. Do you have the PHP mbstring extension installed? This should take care of this problem for you
Jo Henrik Endrerud | System Developer @ Seeds Consulting | http://www.seeds.no