When the Mac sleeps...

Do you really mean 2-3 minutes (as in 120-180 seconds) or do you mean 5-8 seconds? At least with wireless connections, there can be a pause of about 5 seconds as the computer is getting re-connected to the network. That's normal. Waiting 3 minutes is not normal.

What is on the other end of the ethernet cable, and how is the network configured?

 

For me, wired connectivity is up basically as soon as I can fire up a browser.
For wireless, it usually takes 4 or 5 seconds.

There is probably something you can do to improve it, although it may depend on your security settings, etc. I don't have WPA enabled, mainly actually just using MAC filtering since my signal doesn't extend much beyond my house.

 

This has recently started happening to me on my Intel Mini. I've got mine connected with an Ethernet cable to my router, same as my iMac. The rest of my network is working fine (Vonage phone, Linksys WAP, HP Printer, NAS disk). I don't get the problem on my iMac, but my Mini will not connect to my home page for maybe 30-40 seconds (feels like a couple of minutes). I'm using Safari on both systems, but the Mini is running Safari 3, and the iMac is running Safari 2. I need to do some more experimentation using, say, Camino on the Mini to eliminate Safari as the culprit, but I also sometimes get Mail problems when I wake the Mini from sleep, with Mail thinking my accounts are offline and displaying a warning triangle next to the accounts. A reboot hasn't helped the situation. I figure I'll be upgrading to Leopard in a few weeks so it's no biggie until then if I can't fix it.

 

On my powerbook it takes 15 secs max, on my ancient iMac it takes about 20 secs max.