ODE physics question

I''ve implemented A basic ode example in my engine that acts similar to the boxstack example they ship with it. The physics works great, and the simulation seems to model collisions etc very realistically it runs really slow. I have about 10 boxes in my simlulation and I the standard earth gravity vector of (0.0, -9.81, 0.0) using the stand worldstep function (i dont use faststep). the physics step function runs approximately 20 times per second, and each time I call stepworld with a float representing the number of seconds since I last ran physics.step. (This value is approximately 0.05 since it runs 20 times per second and 1.0 seconds / 20fps = 0.05) buit for some reason it runs really slow, as though it were only running at about 1/4 the speed it should be my rendering and all other code is executing very fast still, so I dont think Im bogging the system down....anybody experience this before? Any feedback would be appreciated. Neko