before rushing to any conclusion about the speed

Before rushing to any conclusion about the speed of any services you’re using, it’s worth a sanity check to make sure they’re really the problem. It’s tempting to blame somebody else’s service, but in the long run it’s nearly always easier to address our own problems. Before looking at scaling the external service, we need to check that the way we’re communicating with the service isn’t causing the bottleneck.

Building Scalable Web Sites Cal Henderson