>OK. But you say hits 'are sometimes taking a few seconds' - why is that?

Becaues, some of those hits are not fully optimized yet. Some of them require infrastructure changed and some of them require administration specific procedures, which may take 1 or 2 seconds for example, instead of 0.1 to 0.2.

>If, for example, it's because they spend time retrieving data then making them async could vastly improve the number of hits that could be handled.

Yes, if ever there would be a need for that, I'd take a look at it.