I can confirm this problem with AWS Redis Elasticache. In my case I get atm more than 5000 ms delay when I run netcat call:
time nc -vz my-redis-cache.cache.amazonaws.com 6379
Connection to my-redis-cache.cache.amazonaws.com 6379 port [tcp/*] succeeded!
real 0m5.005s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.000s
The issue comes sporadically, and I can't see any pattern or problem from the Monitoring -view. We are using Redis heavily for mostly writing counters.
Since 5000ms rendering time is unacceptable for our customers, I have no other answer than not to use Redis or Elasticache. I switched some cache on a memcached running on localhost on the EC2 instance.