do you fellows believe that the wesite would run more efficiently or faster if i were to use the XML, or just go straight from the database?

It is almost always better to cache, unless the mechanism you've chosed for caching is itself expensive. XML is flexible, but it carries some overhead, including the additional modules you need to load at runtime to convert it to HTML. An XML cache is probably going to save substantially over going to the database each time, but you're still leaving some performance opportunities on the table.

Why not cache links in an HTML fragment?

In reply to Re: speed and efficiency XML/DBI vs DBI by dws
in thread speed and efficiency XML/DBI vs DBI by primus

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