I was trying to obtain qzv's using qiime2-2021.4 and I had to use high memory nodes that took over 24 hours to complete. That being said, I used an older version of qiime and did not have this issue. The qzv's were generated in less than a few minutes on my local computer. Can someone please help me understand why the latest version of qiime is so memory intensive?
The newest version (2021.8) should be much faster - its not clear to me from your post which version you're reporting to be slow, and which to be fast - can you clarify?
The reason is because an underlying dependency (seaborn) changed how it generates certain plots, and this created a major performance issue. @antgonzafixed that slowdown in the 2021.8 release!