I just had the same issue in Cisco IM and Presence 9.1. After the server access got really slow and I tried almost everything but reinstalling, I noticed that my AXL user password had a @ and after I removed it, everything magically started to work and the slowness went away.
It's really bad that a special character can do this to the whole system but now I can tell you that everything is back to normal, the only issue I'm facing now is that users on one server of the cluster cannot IM with users in the other server of the same cluster, but that's for another post.
hope this is useful.
Best regards
