Searching for persons is slow when searching for or adding an observation

When searching for a person (both searching for an existing observation and to add to a new observation)from the Admin, Manage Observations area, it takes a painfully long time to find the person. It doesn't appear that it's complying to the global properties to make it search quickly when searching for an identifier. The global properties are...

• patient.identifierPrefix
• patient.identifierRegex
• patient.identifierSuffix

You can find descriptions at... http://openmrs.org/wiki/Global_Properties_Descriptions