There might be occurences where your instances behaves slowly. One option would be to inspect the queue to see, whether some jobs hang. Read on to learn how.
BookWyrm is using Celery to manage background jobs.
To watch Celery jobs in real-time BookWyrm uses Flower.
In case you haven't tweaked the docker-compose.yml you can find the service on port 8888. That is: https://MY_DOMAIN_NAME:8888/.
You can find @app.task annotated tasks in the codebase.