I remember having this problem a couple years ago with the game and somehow or another it was fixed but now it is back. So the issue is that every 3 seconds without fail the game will freeze for a half second on my max storm account. It may not seem like a big issue but it totally disrupts your ability to run around, especially on speed boosting mounts. The funny this is that on my lvl 60 life I don't have the issue. It was just fine this morning, I went to my grandparents house and played there, came home and now it is goofed up. If it matters I only played on the storm account away from home.
I think I know what this is about, and it's an old bug that started when they added Quest Finder. It happens when you have no quests at all and there's no yellow arrow, and the game is constantly trying to find a quest. At first, I thought turning off Quest Helper (the yellow arrow) fixed the problem, and it did. However, not having the arrow around, especially in large dungeons, can be a nuisance. I discovered that turning off Quest Finder also fixes this problem and you will still have the arrow.
The same thing happened to me last night. Had used my laptop to briefly log in for about ten minutes while away from home and put my pets back into the kiosk. When I returned home last night and tried to log in, it was insanely slow.
Every. single. frame. caused the game to freeze and be "not responding" for a few seconds. Couldn't move. Pet owl was frozen in mid-air. Turning off the quest arrow did nothing. (And, no kidding, it took me about 15 minutes just to get to that page.)
I checked my Internet connection and reset it. No help. Then I rebooted. That did it. When I launched the game after the reboot, it loaded normally. So I don't know. Maybe some process was running in the background that was killing the RAM.
I had experienced the "3sec ish" pause several days ago.....I was also playing at a "prime" time and "full" realm....I went to a different "perfect" realm and it seemed to diminish......just a coincidence?...maybe....but you might give it try...