Performance issue with large response file & subsequent calls are slow

I'm using ReadyAPI 1.7 and have noticed that test steps (rest GET methods) which have a large response, where it exceeds the allotted limit for the Outline editor limit, cause the application from that point on to run extremely slow, and memory/cpu balloons. Hence all subsequent calls take forever to run. Only solution is to close & restart the application, then everything works fine until I get to that one call which returns the large response.

I've done the performance tuning recommended in other posts with vmoptions, and with transaction logging (disable the log, log only errors). 

I also increased the Outline editor limit to see if that would help & it didnt, so I set it back to 400000.

Is this a known issue? has anyone found a workaround?