Maybe OP is talking about IPNS? Which is unfortunately quite slow... I had to fuss with my TXT entries in DNS a bit to speed things up to an acceptable level (and reference the site via IPFS instead of IPNS)
Yeah that's IPNS as the GP suspected. It's definitely the hardest part of working on top of the IPFS ecosystem. Direct IPFS lookups are much, much better.
On the OpenBazaar project we're experimenting with a centralized IPNS record server that is used to provide a fast response while a real IPNS lookup is done in the background to ensure we're not censoring.
Because records are signed the only thing we could do is censor newer IPNS records and serve old ones, but then nodes just revert back to the slower-to-update records like they had before.
I'm not talking about IPNS, I'm talking about normal IPFS lookups. Hopefully this will improve (maybe has improved, I haven't tested lately), but it used to be bad, to the point where some gateways wouldn't discover content that already existed on other gateways.
