Why are Google Maps 9.5.1 running slow/freezing? My Google Maps tend to freeze whenever I interact with them. Sometimes I can move around the map and it loads fine, but as soon as I do something else, like picking a location, like a restaurant or a bookmarked position, it freezes, which ends in either app completely crashing, or it unfreezing after ~15 seconds. Sometimes it even crashes the SystemUI. Even when I exit the app, the whole system runs slow and laggy until I remove it from recents.

I believe that the issue is not related to phone performance, as I've ran games like GTA III and Need For Speed Most Wanted on it smoothly (It's an Xperia T). I'm using CM12. I've tried deleting the data and cache, but that didn't help. The version of the Maps is 9.4.1.
The Google Maps App is dependent on the Google Play Services app. Whenever you point out a location or a route, or even load a particular area of the map regularly, it records your actions so as to provide a better prediction the next time you access that particular app. 

Those recorded actions are linked to your Google Account through the Google Play Services app, which runs in the background. This might overburden the RAM, and to free more space for it, the system terminates other activities which might be linked to the SystemUI. When they terminate, the SystemUI crashes. 

When you deleted the data and the cache, it just made the app rebuild its data. The records would be with the Google Play services, which would be relinked with the app again. 

When you wiped the data, all previous records would be erased even in Google Play services, so there would be much less data for the app to read while it loads. Hence the speeding up after a data wipe.