Can you elaborate on queries not having "the right indexes"? Since the development server automatically adds indexes for all queries run on local dev machines and the production machines cannot run a query for which the necessary indexes don't exist, it's easy to assume that your indexes must be right.
I'd love to hear more about tweaks to existing indexes that can alleviate these sorts of problems.
The geomodel stuff is what I'm referring to here; it's efficient enough that you can actually execute the queries, but it's not necessarily fast (or cheap) to do so.
I'd love to hear more about tweaks to existing indexes that can alleviate these sorts of problems.