Setting no_watchdog gives about a 3x performance boost under production conditions. The watchdog system is complete overkill just to protect who can access client data. It touches pretty much every method call. Not yet sure how to re architect it.
Chad sez: according to hippa you must have control over which users can access which clients
and client data can be queried all over the app even when you dont think it will the watchdog forcess the security. it is overkill, but we had to ensure there were no loopholes in the app