Were you using a mod that messes with tiles on Gleba or destroys hundreds of entities per second? overgrowth-spread needs to check around every deleted entity or changed tile to wake up nearby overgrowth tiles, so doing many of these operations can cause lag. What were you doing when the game started lagging? It would help a lot if you uploaded the bugged save file for reproducing the issue.
Edit: Nevermind, turns out I fumbled the function for checking near deconstructed entities, and it was waking up far, far more tiles than it should've been (upwards of millions to billions of tiles checked, depending on how many entities deconstructed, and how far away from Gleba's origin they were). Oops! Fixed for next release. Let me know if you still have problems.