It should probably be noted, however, that the original article's suggestion to "avoid doing SQL queries within a loop" is still a good one. Granted, this isn't PHP-specific, so perhaps this wasn't the right place for it. Furthermore, on small traffic websites (which, as other commenters mentioned, are probably the target of an article like this) likely wouldn't see a significant speed up, given the low query volume. Nevertheless, minimizing trips to the database is a good idea.