Yes, essentially. Of course the real work is in creating all of the benchmarks and harnesses to start measuring and investigating; as it always is in these non-trivial systems. The full story summary:

First, hit a rate limiter, removing it partially solved the performance issue at low scale.

Second, there was a slightly expensive "initialization operation" that should be only done once, made sure it only happened once.

Finally, found the expensive round math operation with micro-benchmarks and improving the math operation resulted in doubled throughput.