Oops, I think I didn't express myself very clearly. When I was sending 20 requests a sec in a load test, the average response time for all the requests was 9 seconds. In a normal case, the page was loading in a fraction of that.

Also, we didn't lack all indexes, just a couple of important ones. We've been iterating quickly on the site and we weren't analyzing the performance as our queries were refactored.