[zimpenfish]

> Or is it making sure the queries return at roughly their current speeds even if there's 100x more traffic?

From what I remember, it was this. The DB was MySQL and a whole bunch of stuff would have been less efficient when there were 1000 devices instead of 25. But on the other hand the system was broken and the customer was threatening to cancel everything and fixing the DB stuff was going to take a fair amount of rearchitecting (not least dumping MySQL for something less insane) that we didn't have the time or resources to do in a hurry.