The database is usually the real problem, not the automation platform. I spent months tweaking workflows only to find our bottleneck was crappy database queries getting slammed by concurrent processes. Each workflow step made synchronous database calls that worked fine with 10 records but created massive contention with thousands. Switching to async database operations and proper connection pooling cut our processing time by 70%. Also check if your workflows are holding transactions open too long - that creates locks that cascade into timeout errors. Most people focus on the automation logic but completely ignore the data layer. If you’re using cloud databases, check the IOPS limits too. We hit AWS RDS limits without realizing it and everything crawled to a halt during peak loads.