Hi there!
It’s not your PHP Memory limit that is the issue, I was once exactly where you are, it only gets worse the more entries you have and doubles if you have multiple people accessing the list all day.
When your form have this many entries (we have over 10,000 with over 110 fields in the form) jQuery loads ALL the entries and then paginates them. You have to sacrifice load speed vs search speed. This is true for 99% of the plugin’s that have front ends like this. Only a few do not.
I’ve had the same issues and converted sticky list from a $_POST request to a $_GET request and write to a custom table with only the fields I need for search capabilites. Lastly, I purchased and integrated XCRUD (google it) into WordPress for the front end. Now we have one kick butt system for all these entries. SUPER FAST, Searchable and easy to use for the 30 people that work with it all day.
https://boschdev.nh-ats.com/claims_screenshot.PNG
Don’t get me wrong, Sticky List IS AMAZING and Fried_eggs IS A SAVIOR, without this, we’d have to hire an expensive, high end developer to do this.