thanks Zach. i appreciate the help. i don’t know if i can close this out, but feel free to do so.
if i go through the regular woo channel i have to do a whole bunch of garbage with the system report amongst other things.
before i saw your response, i reviewed the code and saw that it would need to set a site option on first run, which makes sense why it was slow. subsequent attempts ran much faster.
if you know of any potential problems with enabling performance mode, aside from the ability to start from deleted orders mentioned in the documentation, please let me know.
thanks.