Diagnosing long running queries

Also, there's some context as to why I'm running the project on a spinning disk (my personal laptop) instead of an SSD. I'm working on my thesis with Neo4j for the last couple of years now (back when Neo4j was in v2), and during this time, I've tried to run it several times on AWS EC2 with much more powerful instances, like the m3 large, etc. But since I was using the community edition then, I came across a lot of issues, like db crashes, hang/freezing, etc which would require re-running the same query multiple times, or sometimes to start over with importing the data from scratch all over again.

During this time, I've logged some of these issues in the neo4j github repository, like this and this.

Since I'm just a student, using powerful EC2 instances for all of this would have exponentially increased the cost, especially since there was no way of knowing if the current operation would complete successfully or not.

In fact, people still report issues like exponentially large query times or unresponsiveness while using EC2 instances like m5.2x large, as seen in this post.

Regarding this, is there some resource that I can read up on, to understand how to effectively change the retention log parameters?

Thank You once again..