W3 Total cache transient admin issue

Hello I have a real problem with W3 Total cache and the back end admin of my wordpress site and hope someone can help me fix it.

I have been using Query monitor to try and diagnose the issue and found 20 HTTP requests were executed and 17 transients set. Page load is also > 20 seconds.

This happened on every page load, which is obviously wrong. Query-Monitor also reported the transients being set with the correct expiration time (48 hrs for our themes checks, etc.) but then on the next page load they were empty triggering the HTTP requests again the transient being saved one more time.

So, to summarize: on my site, no transient (even from WP’s core) is honoring its expiration time. They are expiring immediately. Since this site has W3TC for caching I thought that might be related to the issue. I temporarily disabled this plugin and things change substantially:

There were only 2 requests were made and no transient was set at all (meaning they weren’t considered expired). Also, page load went down from > 20s to little less than 3s.

So I was wondering if you may have some insights about avoiding the cache for admin-side???

Thank you

https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/w3-total-cache/