sudden netbox timeout issue

[qn-omarmora]

I have been running netbox 4.4.0 (gunicorn) on an ubuntu 22.04 machine behind a nginx reverse proxy with no issue for the past 6 months. Suddenly I started getting 504 timeouts when trying to connect to my instance. I increased my proxy timeouts from 90s to 300s and I can reach the homepage now after maybe 2 minutes. I'm not sure what could have suddenly changed that would start making netbox timeout. Has anyone encountered this issue before?

This is the content of my nginx reverse proxy config.

server {
    listen *:443 ssl;
    
    server_name mynetbox.domain.net;
    
    ssl_certificate     /etc/ssl/private/netbox.crt;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/ssl/private/netbox.key;
    ssl_dhparam         /etc/ssl/private/dhparam.pem;
    
    index index.html index.htm index.php;
    access_log /var/log/nginx/ssl-reverse_proxy.access.log verbose;
    error_log /var/log/nginx/ssl-reverse_proxy.access.log;
    
    location /static/ {
        alias /opt/netbox/netbox/static/;
    }
    
    location / {
        proxy_pass          http://127.0.0.1:8001;
        proxy_read_timeout  300s;
        proxy_send_timeout  300s;
        proxy_set_header    Host $host;
        proxy_set_header    X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header    X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header    X-Forwarded-Host $host;
        proxy_set_header    X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
        proxy_set_header    Proxy "";
    }
}

postgres is up and running on the server and I am able to connect to the DB with no issue.
my gunicorn.py configuration file has bind on 127.0.0.1:8001, 5 workers, 3 threads, timeout 120s, max requests 5000, and max request jitter 500.
I don't have any plugins installed.
ALLOWED_HOSTS is ['mynetbox.domain.net','localhost','127.0.0.1']
I am running netbox on an air-gapped network, no access to internet.

If there is more config that I can provide to give more context please let me know.

Something else I've noticed is that if I try reaching mynetbox.domain.net it takes a while before connecting but I can get to mynetbox.domain.net/login immediately and once I finally do get to the home page, navigating to other pages in the tool is normal, it's just the home page that takes a while to load.

Any and all insight will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!