I&#x27;d hope one of the first things for DB slow down is the running queries (eg. `show processlist` in flavors of MySQL) and seeing the number of rows examined. Maybe your DB doesn&#x27;t have that, so you see hopefully see long running queries and they are mostly the same one, or you can see the same queries in your DB&#x27;s engine status (eg. `show innodb status` in MySQL). If you don&#x27;t have rows examined from earlier, you can run whatever equivalent you have of `explain` on these long running queries that are happening a lot, and now you should find the number of rows it is examining (and probably that it is running a scan query and not indexed).<p>I mean, you only get these scars from actually working with your DB and hopefully in development &#x2F; capacity planning stages, so maybe that makes you a rockstar. Not to take anything away from the Stripe engineer(s).