How to reduce the number of node versions in alfresco?

Question

Document flow

Hello!
I recently started working with alfresco 4 on a not very new project, I was not familiar with it before.
I ran into a not very clear problem, when saving one of the nodes, the entire process hung, and blocked a lot of data with the transaction, as it turned out, the problem was the presence of 2000 of its old versions, according to which the history of its changes is built, namely, all fields of all its versions are processed. what can be done about it?