Hi,
Your problem can have a lot of causes, but telling by the size of your database (80GB occupied) there might be some problems with retrieves from very large tables.
Can you tell the amount of objects exist for the biggest tables, that are frequently retrieved from? And can you tell what entity is loaded in the dropdown and how it is retrieved, and also how big that table is (so how many objects exist in the database). Maybe also share the XPaths that are used to retrieve these objects.
It would also be helpfull if you could provide some screenshots of the metrics of you application from the production environment. Then you can see if for example the database is the problem or that you are running out of memory, or both.
How large is this dataset and does the attribute that’s being searched on have an index on it? What does the XPATH look like?
Since you’re using a custom widget, I would be more inclined to check the number of requests that are being issued to the server as the user is typing. Type ahead can be very expensive if you’re not careful. Are you sure you don’t have a memory leak in that widget and/or you aren’t bombing the runtime server with a lot of requests? That combined with a lot of memory pressure makes me think that there’s something more significant going on here.
Have you tried to switch from drop-down to a select page?
do you still have the performance problems when the select page is opening?