google compute engine tool gcloud is exceptionally slow
I just ran into a similar issue myself, though not as bad as minute long response times. What helped me was turning off the usage reporting.
Looking at some timings:
$ gcloud config set disable_usage_reporting False
$ time gcloud compute -h | tail -1
real 0m7.058s
user 0m0.464s
sys 0m0.088s
A whopping 7 secs to access the help!
Fortunately, this improves greatly after disabling reporting:
$ gcloud config set disable_usage_reporting True
$ time gcloud compute -h | tail -1
real 0m0.541s
user 0m0.459s
sys 0m0.080s
Much better!
I traced this back to packet filters. When I deleted this rule #5 in my AT&T Uverse modem/router (Motorola NVG589), everything works ok. This was a default setting in the modem which caused all sorts of issues.