if you are doing 15-20 COUNTS per page (as he said he was) even if you are on a fast local network those few milliseconds of latency can probably add up, also h

if you are doing 15-20 COUNTS per page (as he said he was) even if you are on a fast local network those few milliseconds of latency can probably add up, also he said he was directly managing updating/invalidating the count cache entries which is probably more effective (because the caching strategy is so specific) than whatever more generic strategy mysql is using.