@EpsilonAdmin That's very possible that someone else (or even I) turned that on in the past not knowing the consequences. Still weird that it only recently introduced the huge slowdown. Whatever the case, I'm very happy that it's now back to acceptable performance. Once again, thanks for your help

@EpsilonAdmin For me this fixed it! Thank you very much. Was this deep search recently added in an update by any chance? For me it would have been a smoother upgrade if this was only "on by default" on new installations, not on updated ones. You could hook into the plugin activation hook. Because now it's obvious this is by design and there is a good reason for my slow search results. But if I didn't know any better I would think my site was broken.

@EpsilonAdmin 2.36.125

I have this issue too. It takes a very long time for a new search to return results. What can I do to improve this? It didn't happen in the past, only recently