Huge Latency In Pre-prod Environment Hello Craft community,

My team and I have built a site for a client and it looks great.  The site runs just fine in my developers local environment and we're all very happy.  I have the site now set up on my preproduction Red Hat environment and when I access it there is about 30 seconds of latency, every single time.  I cannot figure out where this latency happens, perhaps there is a configuration somewhere I am missing?

I can access images, js files, etc. without any issue - but once I hit a php file in the Craft environment, things are super slow.

I tried turning the devMode flag to false in the general configurations and that didn't seem to help.  

This has nothing to do with my browser - I've tried a straight CURL to the URL and I see the same amount of lag.  Perhaps there's some server-side caching I need to enable?  Like I said - this is not just with my site, it was slow during the install as well as when I just access the admin tool to look at/change configurations.  Please help!
I've just ran into this myself this morning. It looks to be related to the SmartMaps plugin doing an IP > Geo lookup using an external service. 

Specifically it looks like it's using this api :https://geoip.maxmind.com/geoip/v2.0/ which is hanging. 

Disabling the plugin fixed my loading issues.