I think the way to read that paragraph is as two separate statements.<p>&gt;PHP is a slow abomination. The entirety of Drupal and all modules have to be bootstrapped and run on every request.<p>and<p>&gt;It runs far too many SQL queries and those queries look atrocious (nested selects, tons of joins, etc).<p>So the first part is about slowness due to how PHP is usually run. The second part is about slowness due to the implementation of Drupal.<p>When I say &quot;how PHP is usually run&quot;, I mean that strictly speaking one could <i>probably</i> write PHP in a way such that there is one part which comprises all the things that take most of the time to load and have this run standalone. However, I think going to such extents might be more work to do in PHP compared to picking another language. Then again, I haven&#x27;t written PHP for several years and even when I did I never did any advanced stuff so for all I know what I&#x27;m saying here might be something PHP professionals have already thought of.