A few months ago we migrated to WebWork 2.18, on Ubuntu 22 LTS. This was a clean install -- we didn't attempt to copy the old database, we just imported any needed courses as tgz and upgraded them. (None of these were used directly, they were just templates for new courses.) We're using Canvas as our LMS, LTI with grade passback.
The system worked fine through the summer term, but now that it's under heavier load I'm getting this error frequently in webwork2.log, and students are complaining they can't submit answers:
Unable to retrieve your permissions, perhaps due to a collision between your request and that of another user (or possibly an unfinished request of yours). Please press the BACK button on your browser and try again. at /opt/webwork/webwork2/lib/WeBWorK/ContentGenerator.pm line 116.
Not every request fails, but once it starts failing for a student it tends to keep failing. I did a web search and saw some references to this problem from 2020 or so, but nothing that provided a fix. Any ideas on how to troubleshoot this? How can I reduce these request collisions?