What would cause a Jira JQL, that uses ZQL, to run extremely slow?

Greetings community.

I'm Jeramy and I'm the Atlassian Administrator for a software company that makes logistics software.

Lately, we've noticed a huge performance issue when running Jira JQL's that contain ZQL code inside of them. We are running Jira in Azure, with multi-node configuration, and on the latest hardware (each VM has 32 GB of ram and a new Intel processor). We are on Zephyr Squad version: 9.3.0.93009768. 

When I tested a JQL search, it took almost two minutes to return the results. However, if I take out the ZQL part, it takes seconds to retrieve the data.

What else can I post here that might help?

Thanks!