Hi,
That is strange. On my end I am getting results within 1-2 seconds max, as measured by the XHR network tool. See it here: https://youtu.be/npeue8NTQSs
Most of the requests were even under 1 second. The auto-populate request is still cached, even though there is no search phrase. I suspect there might be something else conflicting here, maybe a firewall or a network throttle or something, I honestly don’t know.