Also, making everything non-blocking will not necessarily make the user experience better. It will just allow you to have more users concurrently, all waiting for your slow queries. In other words, user A no longer has to wait on users B, C, and D, but still has to wait on his/her own slow query. Depending on your application usage patterns, this could be enough to go from unusable to awesome. Or it could be that your just need to add a ton of indecies.