> adding 1-5ms per query makes it feel not okay

Or going from ~1ms over a local wired network to ~10ms over a wireless network.

Had a customer performance complaint that boiled down to that, something that should take minutes took hours. Could not reproduce it internally.

After a lot of back abd forth I asked if the user machine was wired. Nope, wireless laptop. Got them to plug in like their colleagues and it was fast again.

If you have the ability to batch that communication, you could probably get those minutes down to seconds.