AUA & Article Manager - Slow response/timeouts

After a year of happily using AUA with no issues, my users are now experiencing VERY slow response, timeouts, and internal server errors when accessing articles in the back end. There is no problem with menus, modules, or media, the issues occur with articles only.

So far I have tried all the performance enhancing tips and tricks I could find, and I've installed the latest version of AUA, but no improvement. The only way to resolve the issue is to disable AUA...

Any ideas on what could be causing this?

maybe there is not enough memory available. Check in administrator/index.php?option=com_admin&view=sysinfo how much 'memory_limit' you got. To up the memory, on most hosts you can add this line to your .htaccess file:

php_value memory_limit 256M

128M is default and recommended for Joomla to run.

OK I have done this. Sys info now reports 256 in local, but 90M in master. There was been no noticable change with the issue. I have asked our host to increase this value in php.ini.

I decided to try reducing the number of user groups, as that is the only thing that has changed in the last few months. We had grown to 27 groups with 65 users. Through consolidation I reduced the number of groups to 22 and there seems to be an improvement.

1. Do you believe the 90M master limit is the problem?
2. Could the number of groups or users have a great impact on performance?

P.S. We only have about 2,000 articles

1. is rather lowish. If deleting usergroups makes it behave better, it for sure a matter of memory.
2. in the backend yes, in the frontend hardly

Thank you! We will proceed with both.

Completed - System Info, PHP core reports memory_limit 256M for local and master, but the issue is not resolved. All aspects of the backend work great with no delay except article manager.

Is there anywhere else to look for a solution? Some of my users will be unhappy if I have to move them to the frontend ..