Snippeting is slow: `highlight_fields` with long document causes timeouts

Issue

We have a Typesense cluster with 1.4 Million documents (hosted on Typesense Cloud), some of which have very large content fields (500+KB, see attached examples).

When retrieving results, we sometimes get timeout errors after 7 seconds, which we have pin-pointed to be caused by including "content" in the highlight_fields parameter. If we remove "content" from this field, the queries are quite fast—usually below 1s.

search-examples-request.json
search-examples-response.json

Expected behavior

I'd expect the snippeting/highlighting to not cause such a significant slowness. We already have increased the timeout, but 7s is not even enough in some cases.

Further context

Our use case involves to search related documents which backlink to the one the user is currently viewing. For this we have a refs field, which we filter on to limit the results to all backlinking docs. In addition to the filter on the refs field, the example above has the query "Ra 2015/18/0220" (not visible in the UI screenshot, but in the search-examples-response.json), which will show a snippet where the current document is referenced exactly in the one that backlinks to it.

Example with highlighting (different document), here you can see that the current document "§ 170 StPO" is highlighted in the results:

Example without highlighting, here just a generic snippet is shown, which is not helpful for users:

Version Info

Typesense Version: 27.1
JS SDK version: 1.8.2
Not using the the Instantsearch intergration, fetching via React Server Components (React v19)

Start by reproducing the timeout with the attached search-examples-request.json and the long content field, comparing requests with and without content in highlight_fields. Investigate the snippeting/highlighting path and use the expected highlighted backlink snippet, without multi-second timeouts, as the completion criteria.