In principle claiming cluster management is just a lookup in de database. So it shouldn't take longer than any other action. Cluster management is used to make sure that if you run multiple Mendix Business Servers with a load balancer that only one is executing scheduled events.
How do you measure that 'claiming cluster management' takes really long?
Well the following is printed in the console:
2010-01-04 11:52:04.784 INFO - CORE: Statistics update timeout, claiming cluster management 2010-01-04 11:52:06.643 INFO - CORE: Logout: MxAdmin
and it takes 1 minute and 20 seconds to continue to
2010-01-04 11:53:30.049 INFO - EXTERNALINTERFACE: Initializing external interface and scheduled events...
I don't recall it taking so long, could it have to do anything with this:
2010-01-04 11:52:04.159 INFO - MODULE: Waiting for Jetty server to start in order to initialize Single Sign On Module ???