I know exactly what the cause of this is, I have experienced it:
The default _BESClient_Download_RetryMinutes setting used to be 1 minute, but it was changed to 10 minutes. I strongly recommend changing this setting to 1 minute on all clients. The client will try again after 1 minute, then if that fails, it will double the wait time and continue to double it until it runs out of retries.
The other replies to this post are good info, but I’m fairly confident this is your issue.
Here are some recommended settings: An example clientsettings.cfg to set the default BigFix client settings at install time. Only works with the Windows EXE installer or the OS X installer. For linux, see here: https://github.com/jgstew/tools/blob/master/bash/install_bigfix.sh · GitHub
@steve I don’t see _BESClient_Download_CheckAvailabilitySeconds documented here: Legacy Communities - IBM TechXchange Community
This is the fist I’ve heard of this setting.