I’ve removed every use of the JOIN function when making queries to my database which powers my photoGallery after reading Cal Henderson’s presentation from 2004 on how flickr works. Instead of using JOINs I now use multiple copies of data, and a lot more SELECTs. Performance went up nearly 6 fold and the resources used to generate each page fell by more then 70%. Perhaps my database wasn’t optimized or I was misusing JOINs but there is a noticeable improvement in browsing after removing them.