I just had to increase our timeout from 30s to 60s because I can't figure out why our biggest request is so slow. (Nginx + Php-fpm running on gke)
Solution 1:
Once told to use the php slow_log function, I was able to see that I was hitting the database unexpectedly since I was using a cached response. More data was being eager loaded after the fact upon final json serialization for the return statement