rally task start takes hours for a simple task

I have installed rally 0.0.5 on a debian Jessie machine (to be used for testing single functionalities , not for deployment of benchmarking) .

Running rally works, but it takes hours for just one task. As an example with a neutron task I get

Load duration: 4460.84642696
Full duration: 16581.1330471
 (in seconds)

It seems most of the time is spent in the verifying stage, gathering information about the cluster (nova/neutron/... queries).
I am not running tempest, although this verification step sort of reminds me of that somehow....

Notice that I am NOT running

rally verify start

but it seems this is sort of run intrinsically when the task is submitted.

Any idea what is going on here? Can the verification phase be optimized/skipped? (I am thinking of doing it just once, and not for all the tasks)

While 2 or so hours may not be a problem for just a simple task, I am concatenating several ones into a single json file, and to run this takes longer than a day!

Any help will be appreciated!

Kind regards,

Alessandro