Yep, that was pretty much exactly the issue. Except this was in a home-rolled solution which made it incredibly opaque where the ".friends" access actually hap

Yep, that was pretty much exactly the issue. Except this was in a home-rolled solution which made it incredibly opaque where the ".friends" access actually happened (or if it wasn't ".acquaintances.where(type='friend')". Made it very easy to get pages on the road, which just turned incredibly slow later down that same road, and fixing it wasn't trivial without knowing exactly what to preload when.