WordPress Admin pages temporarily timing out because of SendGrid plugin

I had an issue yesterday (August 5th 2015) with my non-public wordpress site that we just added the SendGrid plugin to. We installed the SendGrid plugin two days ago. Yesterday, around 11:30 EST we started seeing latency spikes of up to 60 seconds (timeout setting) and pages would just stop rendering completely at times. Other times they would eventually show up after waiting long enough. This seemed to start out of the blue and ONLY affected the admin ui. The content pages worked fine without CDN or caching enabled. The last plugin we installed was the Sendgrid plugin. We disabled the plugin and immediately the issues stopped completely. The admin site worked perfectly.

In order to try to get some more information as to why it was causing the slowdown, we reenabled the plugin maybe two hours after we saw the problems. We no longer we seeing performance issues with the admin ui. We are thinking there might have been some connectivity issues between our WordPress site in AWS and the SendGrid APIs. Is that possible? Is there anyway someone could verify this for us?

I read a post on here from a year ago where someone complained about slowness in the admin UI because of authentication calls to SendGrid where your answer was that’s the way it works. I’m assuming they were just seeing a slight performance issue. But pages completely timing out and taking more than 60 seconds to render don’t seem like normal authentication calls causing a slight performance issue, so I have to assume this was an aberration. But I want to get to the bottom of what caused it and not just trust it won’t happen again.

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