[jstanley]

I've never used mongo in anger, but that doesn't matter, my answer is:

Profile the application. Find out what it's spending too much time on, and figure out how to make it do less of that.

[pjc50]

Can't upvote this enough. You cannot reliably improve what you cannot reliably measure, and Amdahl's Law will tell you where to work.

I wish you every success in this business - if it takes off, I might try it myself. I found `oprofile` to be my preferred Linux profiler, and haven't worked out what the corresponding Windows solution is yet.