I have some script to create a search directory; the script calls a routine to create a set of URL strings, but it appears that the routine is called on every request. This clearly has some problem, but I am not that good at php. Can anyone help me? This briefly describes how this code runs and you can even get the entire source code here.

Help me !!!

Telling you how to optimize the code unfortunatly is not an easy thing to do...

first thing you need to find out is if your scripting system has the Zend Optimizer installed, if it does, then do not worry about it.. the optimizer will probably optimize enough automatically such that you do not need to worry.

Aside from that, professionals struggle for a great part of their career to figure out how to best optimize a system, there are many factors in which one takes into account to do this... and an incredible amount of statistics (even if you do not realize it).

It could take a while to optimize a small piece of code like that if I am not sure exactly what application it has... and even then, still a fair bit of work.

There are people that actually do optimizations for a living... and that's all they do. I believe its termed Software Metrics, at least here in the US.

As kurifu mentions, optimization is usually done internally... in an abstract fashion if you will. Perhaps you can let us know the sections that are causing you the most concern and we can address them from there?

Post them in this forum if you could, it is exasperating to play link tag trying to find what you are talking about :S