Bill Payments slow to process

We have a regular (weekly) habit of going in to Transactions > Vendors > Pay Bills and filtering by due date, marking appropriate bills to be paid and clicking the "Save" button -- this proccess normally and correctly redirects us to a page where we see the status of the Bill Payments being created.

Normally, the process is nearly instantaneous and the users simply leave the screen and go straight to "Print Checks and Forms" and print the checks.

However in the last two weeks, they've had to wait up to 10 minutes for the process to create the Bill Payments and place them in the print queue.  Our volume of bills and quantity of vendors is very low and only slightly variable (about 30-50 bills paid to 3-5 vendors/checks), so It's not that we're giving it more work to do.