Performance killing issue with many recipes

Currently, when the cooked plugin manages a lot of recipes (in our case, about 7000 records in wp_posts with post_status of ‘publish’), the cooked plugin times out all attempts to use the /wp-admin/ part of wordpress.

Specifically, wp-content/plugins/cooked/includes/class.cooked-settings.php, line 99 (the first line of public static function tabs_fields() which is used for populating a cooked widget, and runs for every page load) calls code which builds a data structure representing every recipe. And when there’s a lot of them, just pulling them out of the database times out.

Currently, the best solution we’ve found for this issue is to modify the cooked plugin itself, so that tabs_fields doesn’t do anything. But this makes upgrading the plugin difficult.

(I think I have reported this issue elsewhere, but I never got an acknowledgement of that report, so I wanted to leave this here, so I could have something to refer to.)