I gotcha. Thanks for the great response!
We do have really aggressive page caching, 1800 seconds TTL. I think there are hiccups when that cache expires, then the plugin needs to do all it’s lookups again. And the real slowness might come from the uploads directory being symlinked. The actual location of those uploads exists on another fileserver from where the code is actually being executed.
I’ll try disabling HTTP lookups and see how that does.
Thank you!