When building the top nav of a project, each app config entry queries mongo to get the project. That isn't necessary since the project is already known. This can be seen with the timing middleware. Set production.ini stats.sample_rate to 1, and increase the logging:
[logger_timermiddleware] level = DEBUG handlers = qualname = timermiddleware
And then:
tail -F /var/log/allura/allura.log | grep ODMSession.*Project
allura:db/4358