how to troubleshoot a slow connection?

[Rodrigo Amestica]

Hello,

for some time now the connection to my remote development environment has
degraded to a very slow status. I use ssh. I'm not fully sure, but it seems to
me that the slowness started happening after moving from emacs 24.2 to 24.3 and
that happened back in April of this year.

When I open a connection to my remote 'hostname' then in Messages I see the
following logs:

1. Tramp: Waiting for prompts from remote shell
2. Tramp: Sending command `exec ssh   -e none hostname'
3. Tramp: Found remote shell prompt on `hostname'
4. Tramp: Opening connection for hostname using ssh...done

the time elapsed between #1 and #3 is ~5 seconds (#2 seems to go so fast in the
minibuffer that I cannot see it). The time elapsed between #3 and #4 is ~14
seconds!

I have tried permanent ssh connections (ControlMaster) without any improvement.

If I start emacs like 'emacs -Q' then the above timing figures remain the same.

From the command prompt, login (ssh) to the remote host takes ~5 seconds. Which
seems to match the same timing I see between logs #1 and #3.

Is it there anything else I could do to troubleshoot my so slow connection?

Thanks,
 Rodrigo

emacs 24.3.1
tramp 2.2.6-24.3