We didn't make it immutable and we didn't add an index to it. Those are our next action items to help improve the performance of it.

Honestly, instead of looking into more performance gains, I wanted the team to get a huge win and for the team to look good in front of senior management :D.

If you want to optimize for looking good in front of senior management, you would put a sleep() in there to make it run for 5 minutes. Then when senior mgmt comes back and complains that 5 minutes is still too much, you remove the sleep(), bill a few hours to time tracking, and praise the new performance improvements that you just deployed. ;)

See also: http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Speedup-Loop

Yes, this is exactly the article that I had in mind earlier. Thanks for digging it up.

Hahahahahaha.

Ha ha politics driven development. Love it.

Ehh. More about boosting confidence and team morale than politics. The goal was achieved, and we can yak shave during slack time if need be.