Performance Bottleneck Investigation

Investigate this performance issue step by step.

Symptom: {{symptom}}
Affected endpoint: {{endpoint}}
Latency metrics: {{latency_metrics}}

Think through systematically:

1. BASELINE: What is normal performance? How far off are we?

2. REPRODUCTION: Can we reproduce this consistently? Under what conditions?

3. PROFILING: Where is time being spent? (CPU, I/O, network, waiting)

4. DATABASE: Are there slow queries? Check query plans.

5. EXTERNAL CALLS: Are third-party APIs slow? Check timeouts.

6. RESOURCE CONTENTION: Is there lock contention or resource exhaustion?

7. CACHING: Are caches cold or missing? What is the hit ratio?

8. CODE PATH: Is there algorithmic inefficiency? (O(n^2) loops, etc.)

9. ISOLATION: Can we isolate the bottleneck to a specific component?

10. SOLUTION: What is the fix? What is the expected improvement?