> "Well, yes, the web page takes 28 seconds to load, but it's because we do several hundred database queries that are really slow, we do it in a slow language,

> "Well, yes, the web page takes 28 seconds to load, but it's because we do several hundred database queries that are really slow, we do it in a slow language, we pull in dozens of unnecessary third party libraries and also our server is underprovisioned." How much faster does the web page load because you've explained why the web page takes a long time to load? As I understand this issue, your metaphor would be different. Something like "Yes, the web page takes 28 seconds to load, but right now our provider is having allocation issues and we aren't getting the resources we have allocated. Let's wait to see if that gets fixed soon before spending time on researching and over-optimizing things, we might end up losing more than we gain if the latency is indeed due to the provider".