Does anyone know what performance levers there are for speeding up the K2 Worklist web part in SharePoint?

BlackPearl 4.6.1

SharePoint 2010 SP1 CU Feb2012

SQL 2008 R2 on Windows 2008R2.

I'm in the development environment, so virtual machines are pretty small.. It would help to know what things I can tweak for better performance. Is it SharePoint memory, app pool memory in IIS, database memory... CPU multi threading ?? What windows performance counters can I look at?

Any insight would be appreciated.