What happens when your project’s RDBMS is just not enough to deal with unexpectedly huge amounts of data?

You could try to de-normalize some tables here and there to avoid unnecessary JOINs, create a few indexes, implement some kind of pagination or even pre-process the data into a more palatable format. However, if you did all that and it still was not enough, the “natural impulse” is to give up on the RDBMS altogether and just use Elasticsearch. Sounds like a no-brainer, right?