SharePoint Service Pack/Cumulative Installation Took A long Time

We recent installed SharePoint 2010 SP2 followed by the December 2015 cumulative updates in a test environment. The install process took between 2 1/2 and 3 hours to complete on each of the servers in the farm, and the upgrade process took between 20 and 30 minutes to complete.

However, when we ran the install process in production, it only took between 20 and 30 minutes, followed by another  20 and 30 minutes for the upgrade process.

One of the differences between the test and live environments, is that the test environment does not have internet access, but production servers do.

A colleague mentioned to me that they encountered an issue when installing a Exchange server service pack on a server that did not have internet access, which was resolved by disabling the "Check for publisher's certificate revocation" option under Internet Options -> Advanced -> (security section) Check for publisher's certificate revocation.

Does anyone know whether the SharePoint installation process checks for certificates, and if so, whether the above IE update should be applied.