Export Webi Doc with Images Extremely Slow

Version: 14.2.6.3193

We have Webi documents with images in them. The images are actually hyperlinks, where the cell is formatted as an image hyperlink. We often export these reports to Excel or PDF, and, up until a week ago, it would only take 20 to 30 seconds to export these reports. Then something changed (and we haven't been able to figure out what), and now it can take anywhere from 10 minutes to 2.5 hours for the export to complete. The more images, the longer it takes. If there are no images, it exports quickly.

We have talked to the folks who host the system where the images are stored. They claim no changes have been made on their end. We had the network folks trace the traffic, and they report no issues on the network. We have tried to figure out if something changed in BI, but haven't found anything.

So now we turn to you. If you have any ideas on where we can look to find the issue, please let me know.

Thanks for your help.