A lot of developers want to go to 3.11 because of the speed improvements, but most distros never have the latest Python version.
Using the deadsnakes third party repo is the easiest way aside from compiling it yourself (which is safer and recommended):
Step 1 - Add the repo
apt-add-repository ppa:deadsnakes/ppa
If you get an error about requests then install it:........
This is a simple fix but not a simple problem and it still doesn't make sense to me.
But in a nutshell if your target proxy server works fast when accessing directly over SSL then this may be your issue.
It seems SSL does not play nicely when the target proxy destination/host has a riduculously long key (such as 8192 bits long). Now this is normally not a problem, in fact the target server could be accessed with hardly any delay directly despite such a long key.........