With any production server, there's always a bottleneck, slowing everything else down. It may be a poorly designed database, lack of memory, poor software design, or just not enough grunt. We have the skills to monitor and identify the problems on a server, and either recommend or implement solutions to improve the performance of your production platform. It's a never-ending battle though, as once you've fixed one bottleneck, another part of the system will be slowing you down. However, once performance is at acceptable levels, monitoring of your systems will keep track of this.