Mondrian MDX requests can be slow in production environments for several reasons: large schemas with many dimensions and measures can cause performance issues; querying large datasets from the database can also impact performance. To address these issues, the document discusses profiling Mondrian requests, optimizing the JVM and database, using caching, and tuning the Mondrian schema. A Mondrian schema pool is also described that reuses schema objects and periodically flushes unused schemas to free memory.