Before I would look into caching the html, I would look at trying to improve my DB performance. Are you caching connections to your database? If not, then you probably want to have a pool of open db connections available to your program. Connecting to the database is usually very costly. Also, as was already mentioned, make sure that your tables are properly indexed. I'm not sure if your database has an "explain plan" to show how your query will be executed, but if it does try to minimize the number of table/full scans that are performed.