Android : Android Poor Network Performance from 4.4 to 4.4.4

I have a program doing a periodic HTTP Post (every second) to my own web server. The app worked fine on my Motorola Droid Mini test phone running Android 4.4. About three days ago, I allowed one of my test phones to update to Android 4.4.4. Now, the request works fine but every fourth request takes a ridiculous 10 seconds to complete a post on the 4.4.4 phone. The second phone running 4.4 still works fine.

I have tried using both the HttpPost method in the Apache library and the HttpURLConnection as recommended by Google. Both methods work fine under 4.4, but every fourth request hangs for 10 seconds under 4.4.4. (The requests take about 200-400ms normally)

For further testing, I set the timeout to 1.5 seconds. The pattern once again repeats 3-4 successful post requests each taking 200-400 ms but instead of the fourth post taking 10 seconds, after three successes, I get 4 timeout exceptions until the 5th connection attempt finished with the expected delay of 200-400ms. Thus, I timeout for 10 seconds anyway until the fifth connection completes.

Anyone know what happened with the 4.4.4 update on the Droid Mini to change the underlying networking? As a side note, I am doing all my debugging through Wifi as the phones are not active on the 3g. Any thoughts?