How about "things start to be come messy when it become difficult to maintain and document your code?"

IMO if you're not facing perf issues (altho' you i think you infer that with the comment about placeholders), things tend to dive faster into "kaos" the more complex it becomes.

For example if you're making heaps of calls because the information in your db is poorly normalised that would be messy in my book.

Another example, if you're making heaps of calls because youre trying to fit too much information on on page. That is a messy application design. In this case, I would tend to break the site into categories and have each category in seperate sections to dilute the content a touch.

If your application is getting too big for one developer, and you only have budget for one you could heading into "messy" land. I say this because once you have a system so big, bits of it will be forgotten, and when something changes, something breaks, it then takes time (and cashola) to track down the problems which can further compound other issues you may be facing such as time to market, and lead to resource contention.

If youre redesigning your site, dont forget most users dont like things more than about 3 clicks away.

Cut off? purely arbitraty depending on your application design, info system back end, hardware, performance, et al. Take a look at sites that have lots of aggregated content, (such as yahoo) and copy the design if you need to.

In reply to Re: (Alternative viewpoint) Perl/CGI + MySQL: How many calls is too many? by Ryszard
in thread Perl/CGI + MySQL: How many calls is too many? by Anonymous Monk

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