"I'm a network admin by day and a PHP freelancer by night," Jarod writes. "It works pretty well. My clients (all two of them) assign me low-priority, get-it-done-whenever type projects, and I do my best to deliver 'soon' rather than 'later'. "

"During the day job, I got a handful of calls from an unrecognized number. When I finally had a chance to call back, it was a referral who was in 'very desperate' to fix his application. Apparently, they hired a graphic design shop to build them a CMS site, and it was slow as molasses. They spent weeks trying to improve things, but it just got worse. Fortunately, I was able to look at it that evening, and after digging through the project, I isolated the problem. It was coming from an addressbook view; their addressbook had 120,000 entries, and displayed 50 at a time," 

function getAlphabetList($list = null)
{   
    $alphabet = split(' ', 'A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z');

    foreach($alphabet as $letter)
    {
        $has_letter = false;
        if(is_array($list))
        {
            foreach ($list as $value) 
            {
                    if(substr(strtoupper($value),0,1) == strpos($letter,$value,1))
                    {
                        $has_letter = true;
                    }                   
            }
        }
        
        if($has_letter)
        {               
            $output .= '<a href="?letter='.$letter.'">'.$letter.'</a> ';
        } else {
            $output .= $letter.' ';
        }
    }
    return $output;
}

Jarod added, "in most cases this is just plain bad practice. But when checking 120,000 in the addressbook 26 times to generate a link list at the top of the addressbook view, it was definitely a bit wasteful."

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