[gsteph22]

FYI: Heroku is fantastic for scaling apps. But if it's your database that's the bottleneck...you've got problems. Because your options with SQL are scaling up or sharding, each quite painful. If you want any advice, ping me.

[AlexC04]

Perhaps rewriting the database to use MongoDB? Their http://www.mongodb.org/ tutorial took about 10 minutes and is really easy to get to know.

As a DB they say it's designed for SPEED and SCALE. It might be worth looking at. (who's got the time right?) :)

[dasil003]

Alternatively, I've gotten a lot of mileage out of using redis as a cache to selectively optimize data piece by piece.