The consulting company K-Algorithms specializes in the area of architecture, design, development and post-implementation improvements of complex database driven applications. Every manager of an application development or production support team is familiar with situations where the customer complains about their application running slowly. When hiring new specialists for the team, questions on how to address such situations play the most important role. And yet, diagnostics of application performance problems and/or estimation of application scalability present a major problem which does not have a simple solution. Performance problems can be created by one program performing an important business function sucking all the juice from the available hardware. Such problems can't necessarily be addressed by simply purchasing more hardware. In particular cases such purchases would not improve anything or would be ridiculously expensive.