Our in-house products management system is running into a serious slowdown: whenever I search the product by item code, the results take ages to appear. Everything else—orders, admin pages—responds fine, so the bottleneck seems isolated to the product search endpoint itself. Here’s what I know so far • The query runs against the Products table only. • The slowdown is recent; no major feature deploys happened around the time it started. • Server resources look normal, which makes me suspect inefficient SQL, missing indexes, or an application-layer loop. What I need from you 1. Profile the current search request end-to-end (database, backend, possible API calls). 2. Identify the specific hotspot causing the lag. 3. Deliver an optimized fix—whether that’s a refactored query, new index, caching layer, or code adjustment—while keeping existing functionality intact. 4. Prove the improvement with before/after response-time metrics. A sub-2-second search for typical queries will be considered success. You’ll have access to the staging environment, the current codebase, and the database schema. Please outline briefly how you’d tackle the diagnosis, the tools you prefer (e.g., EXPLAIN, New Relic, Chrome DevTools, etc.), and an estimated timeframe.