ServiceNow Report dot-walking Performance Surprise

This week I was working with user who had a dashboard that contained a report with some dot walking in the listed fields. Per ServiceNow, there is nothing wrong with doing this, just keep the chain link to three levels.

The Problem

In this case the user was using their report to test some data in a sub production instance and it would not return before the timeout interval. Sure, sub production is slower but this report returns in a under a second in production. It turns out, dot walking on a particular field, really affected the performance in the cloned sub production instance.

The Solution

After removing the stage field, the report returned right away.