We have some projects on our server where we have noticed that the execution time/duration is 6mins or more which causes all others analysis to be in the Pending queue. Looking at the Compute Engine log we see a commonality where the following steps take a long time .
Is there anything that can be done to reduce these times?
First, your version is past EOL. You should upgrade to either the latest version or the current LTS at your earliest convenience. Your upgrade path is: