I think they expanded their databases with much more new data, and split it up for Planets and for Stars separately (i guess). These requests are basically database requests, so this might take additional time? It seems a bit long indeed. The data is of order megabyte so that takes a second to transfer nowadays. What's happening the other time? not sure...
You can send them a 'bug' report, and mark it as a (big) speed regression, attaching a notebook with both examples. They might look in to it....
