PAINFULLY slow authentication (no replies)

Hi All~ I am using the latest connector/net dll's for my C# web application and am experiencing ridiculously slow connection times. Around 15 to 20 seconds!

While testing, I'm looking at the client connections in MySQL workbench and can see the connections come in, but they sit in the unauthenticated state for the aforementioned time period.

Any ideas what could be wrong? Is it just the connector?

I'm using the MySQL session state provider, my Global.asax writes to a login log, and my index page grabs a value from the db (so, 3 connections initially).

Here are some of the settings in my.cnf:

skip-name-resolve
max_connections = 1000
max_connect_errors = 100
max_allowed_packet = 32M
max-heap-table-size = 32M
tmp-table-size = 32M
thread_cache_size = 2000
open-files-limit = 65535
innodb_buffer_pool_size = 5G

I've also tested using the devart dotConnect dll and get much better results with around 1 second authentication time.

I'm hesitant to think it is just the connector, otherwise this would be a major issue for a lot of people.

I'm connecting to a Percona Server(running MySQL 5.6) on a Ubuntu 14.04 trusty installation running 8GB memory and a Intel Core i3.

Any ideas? Any thoughts would be much appreciated!