[nizmow]

Follow up: yes, you're all correct, but sometimes things in an organisation aren't perfect and I've been in many situations where the database is the bottleneck with little power to change it. Now that I think about it, it's mostly a symptom of the database frequently under a different 'organisational area' compared to the application. This means we might have the ability to, for example, easily add more application servers, but the database falls under a different department and any changes require a lot more coordination with other parts of the business. I realise this could happen for any resource, but in my experience it's very common to have it occur with a database.