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.........
Here's a proven example of what a bad hard drive can do, it was technically functioning OKin a RAID array but the system became extremely low and the load become high and IOWAIT was even higher and I always thought it was a bad application. The truth is that this failing 1TBHitachi has slowly gotten worse and caused huge slowdowns, (eg. 100% load on Thunderbird waiting for e-mails to load etc..). After swapping it out, tabs change instantly, emails are not lagged, and........
mod_status is a great way to track down the source of high CPU usage and to find what vhost/script is the cause of it.
It gives you a live view of bandwith usage, CPU usage, and memory usage broken down by domain/vhost and script/URI.
Enable mod_status
vi /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
ExtendedStatus On
SetHandler server-status
Order Deny,Allow
Deny from all
All........
This drive is clearly on the way out, the Kernel knows it but I'm surprised that SMART is not concerned. I didn't blame Seagate for their past issues until now. This hard drive has hardly been used and has not even been powered on for a year according to SMART.
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family: Seagate Barracuda 7200.11
Device........