Exactly! Blockchain and PoW are terrible but id really like to know how much time and electricity is consumed to serve ads, cool servers, train and educate people to effectively become ad engineers.

The basic idea is to keep data as close to the processor as possible, so with a database that means storing the result of commonly used queries in memory.

• https://aws.amazon.com/caching/
• https://aws.amazon.com/caching/database-caching/

There's no need to migrate the database, that shouldn't be an issue at this size. Caching should be implemented as another comment suggested.

I'd be interested as well.