Recently, a Servicedesk 7.1 Sp1 user encountered a very perplexing problem.  When resolving incidents, the amount of time required for the process viewer to refresh and show that the incident is resolved or closed is normally a short time (2-3 mins).  However, this users system was not showing the incident resolution until anywhere from 14 - 40 minutes after the Close Incident task was completed.

Thru SQL profiler trace, and Info level log review, it was discovered that this issue surrounded incident escalations.  Further analysis showed that in the SD.IncidentManagement project, in the Initial Diagnosis Model, under the Event Configuration tab of  the Initial Diagnosis dialog workflow component, in the Escalation Configuration section,  there was an escalation named “Scheduled”.  It has a decision model with 40 elements in it, and was running every 10 minutes.  It was designed to be sent out for a scheduled re-opening of incidents that had been put on some form of hold.  It was an older process and, for the most part does not get used, and was removed in the 7.1 Sp2 versions of Incident Management.

 This is what was slowing things down.  In situations where there are large numbers of open incident processes, this ended up running over the top of itself.  

the way to bring speeds back up to expected performance is to remove the "Scheduled" escalation from the Escalation Configuration.  Save the project and republish.