high resource usage in high-traffic systems

[donrestarone]

trafficstars

Describe the bug

We have noticed patterned outages (eg: nikean.org)

and high resource use in certain systems (eg: sipshucksip / markedrestaurant.com)

The goal of this task is to find the causes for high resource usage (by using Violet Rails profiling functionality: https://github.com/restarone/violet_rails/releases/tag/0.9.98) and address them so we can run high traffic systems on low power EC2 instances again (the goal is to be able to run an app like Nikean.org on a t3.small)