So I was telling my wife about this issue, and she had two interesting comments.
When I told her that the customer was complaining about performance, she stopped me to figure out what I meant by that. When I told her that they had to wait for 20 minutes, her response was:
Oh, I thought you were talking about 1/16 of a millisecond here again. Well, if it is 20 minutes, why make a fuss about it? They should go have a cup of coffee or something.
The second observation was when I told her that we narrowed things down to suggestions taking up a lot of a CPU:
Oh, so you told them to go and buy some more RPM, right?