How to speed up calls to microsoft graph endpoints? - azure

Question

We make calls to the groups and users endpoints for Microsoft Graph and they are taking 200+ ms to complete. The web application making the calls is hosted as an App Service in Azure (South Central US). For some users we need to make multiple calls per user request and it is slowing down our application significantly. I have reviewed the best practices and known issues with MS Graph and have found no resolution. Is caching the only way to speed this up?
Documentation we have reviewed:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/best-practices-concept
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/known-issues
The endpoints we are seeing this delay with are:
https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/groups
https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/users
We have seen the same delay with both HttpClient REST calls and the SDK. We get the same delay if we make a call for a single user or all users.
Code using HttpClient that takes 200+ ms within an Azure data center:
var accessToken = await GetBearerAccessToken();
var url = "https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/users/" + id;
using (var client = new HttpClient())
{
using (var request = new HttpRequestMessage(HttpMethod.Get, url))
{
request.Headers.Authorization = new AuthenticationHeaderValue("Bearer", accessToken);
using (var response = await client.SendAsync(request))
{
if (response.StatusCode == HttpStatusCode.OK)
{
var json = await response.Content.ReadAsStringAsync();
result = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<Salesperson>(json);
}
}
}
}