Problem description

We are experiencing severe performance issues in our OS DefectDojo instance (latest release). Even with only three parallel users, the system becomes noticeably slow. One example reported by a user:

• Navigating to a finding (e.g., _All Products → product x → Sort findings High → Finding takes at least 8 seconds per request.
• If five users open different findings in parallel, the load time for a single user increases to 30–60 seconds or more.
• This delay is reproducible and affects other areas like the dashboard, where initial load time is ~8s, but under load (parallel access) also increases to 30s+.

📷 Screenshots:

• ![Finding load]
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The issue gives the impression of global performance degradation when individual actions are executed (e.g., deleting reports, creating engagements).

Steps to reproduce

1. Open a finding as described above.
2. Observe the time it takes (~4-8s).
3. Repeat this from 5 browser sessions or accounts in parallel.
4. Load times increase drastically (up to 60s per action).

Expected behavior

Findings and the dashboard should load in a reasonable time (ideally <2-4s), regardless of moderate parallel access.

Additional context

We noticed that displaying findings with lots of history or similar findings seems to slow things down more. We suspect possible performance bottlenecks in DB queries, ORM joins or similar.

Our questions:

1. What performance optimization measures would you recommend?
   (e.g., database indexing, caching layers, configuration tuning)

2. Would scaling vertically (more CPU/RAM) help mitigate these issues, or is the current bottleneck rather architectural/software-related?

3. Are there known performance limitations or improvements planned regarding how findings and dashboards are loaded and rendered?

We’d really appreciate any guidance or best practices you can share.